Every once in a while there comes a time when ancient wrongs are righted, and justice is finally done.
Friday December 4th, 2009 will go down as such a day.
One year ago the title of Belhelvie Church Quiz champions was cruelly snatched from the team known as the “Pumpkin Pears” by just half a point. But just over a week ago the record was set straight. A 13 point margin of victory, thanks in no small part to a ten point Christmas Carols round, and much trickier 5-point round on the Christmas story as it’s found in the gospels. Guess which team got 15/15 on those two?!
This is what we had to answer in that second question:
How many gospels have a nativity story? (Answer – 2)
Can you name them? (Matthew, Luke)
Which of those two tells the story of the shepherds (Luke)
Interesting isn’t it?! We think we know the Christmas story because we’ve heard it for years, but in actual fact, what we’re presented with at Christmastime is an amalgam of two nativity stories, laid over with a gloss of romanticism.
Don’t say it in front of the kids, but there’s no mention of a little donkey, or an innkeeper in either Matthew or Luke’s accounts. The stable’s by no means certain, and in all likelihood the wise men arrived a good few months after the baby was born.
Over the years, what’s happened is that the nativity-play version of the story has imprinted itself onto our minds and we accept it almost uncritically, forgetting to ask what the source material in Matthew and Luke really says.
That’s a good exercise for a snowy afternoon- sit down with a cup of coffee and read through the two different accounts of the nativity story. You’ll be surprised at what you find. And what you don’t find.
But the main thing you’ll discover is how different in tone the two accounts are.
Luke’s story is filled with joy and light and glory. It’s Luke who tells us about the delight surrounding Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John; he focuses on Mary’s feelings and her acceptance of this role she’s called to have. He recalls the song of joy she sang that’s known as the Magnificat.
Luke’s account is full of angels, who bring tidings of great joy to people who are wide awake. He has the word coming first to the shepherds who return to the fields rejoicing at what they found down in Bethlehem. He has Simeon and Anna, delighted to see the messiah with their own eyes in their old age. It’s all good.
Matthew’s gospel, by contrast, is much darker. The light is still there, but from the word go, it’s struggling against the darkness.
Matthew, perhaps as we’d expect for a Jewish writer of his day, focuses on the man in the story and spends a good deal of time on Joseph’s predicament.
It’s Matthew who tells us just how rocky things were between Mary and Joseph because of her pregnancy, and who raises the issue of divorce as a real possibility.
People see angels in Matthew too, but always in dreams, always in the darkness. There’s no mention of the shepherds or the angels – instead we have these strange mystics coming from the east, and getting things badly wrong at first by stirring up Jerusalem’s tyrant king.
They bring strange gifts more suited for a burial than a birth, and after they leave, Herod issues a decree that all the local boys aged 2 and under be slaughtered. Mary and Joseph have to flee and become refugees in Egypt until it’s finally safe to return and settle down in Nazareth.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the two accounts contradict one another because I don’t think they do. We have to take them together. But they do reflect two very different perspectives on what was going on.
They’re both Biblical accounts. They both carry weight. But which one do you think has had a bigger influence on what we call the Christmas story? It's Luke, isn't it?
When did you last hear a carol about Joseph’s dilemma; or the poor mothers who were robbed of their sons because Mary brought hers to full term? Or the fact that the infant Jesus started out life as a refugee? Maybe not a bad beginning for someone who in later life claimed he had nowhere to lay his head.
We’re missing Matthew’s influence, aren’t we?
And because of that, we’re missing part of what Christmas is supposed to be about.
At this time of year, we’re sold a vision of what Christmas should be. It’s tinsel and lights and open fires; it’s families and presents and good food; it’s love and harmony and goodwill to all men. It’s a secularized version of Luke. Goodwill minus God.
But what if Christmas, for you, doesn’t look the way the media people say it should?
What if it’s a lonely time for you, because you’re by yourself. Or the absence of that special person is particularly hard to bear?
What if the family get-together in your house is less like a Marks and Spencer’s ad and more like a fist-fight in Albert Square?
What if this is the first Christmas after your marriage has broken down, and your kids are waking up on Christmas morning to hugs from just one parent?
What if it’s hard to get into the spirit because you’re ill and you just don’t have the energy for it?
What if you can’t afford the Christmas everyone tells you you should be having, because you’ve lost your job, or you know it’s under threat?
If that’s where you’re at, the Christmas we’re sold in the shops and on the telly doesn’t have much to say to you. In fact, it’s rather embarrassed to have you around.
But Matthew has something to say.
Matthew reminds us that in the darkness of our loneliness, our conflicts, our illness and our loss, hope can still come. And in time, and with faith, that hope can become a light that changes everything.
And how does it come?
If comes as we wait and watch attentively and don’t give up. When we realise that no situation we find ourselves in is God-less or God-forsaken. There is always hope. It’s just that sometimes in life we have to look harder to find it.
John the evangelist has no nativity story, but of Christ’s coming into the world he says this – “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out”. I wonder if he pinched that idea from Matthew, because that’s the tenor, not just of his nativity story, but of his whole gospel.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of his day, but at times, his life was scarred by tragedy. His first wife, Mary Potter, died after a miscarriage in 1835, and in 1861 his second wife, Frances Appleton, died from burns she sustained when her clothing caught fire.
That same year, the American Civil War broke out and two years into the conflict, Longfellow got the news he’d been dreading when his son was seriously injured in action.
He found it hard to write in the latter years of his life, And sitting down at his desk, one Christmas Day, he heard the church bells pealing out and their noise seemed to mock him in the grief he’d borne across the years.
He set himself to work, and penned these lines:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,
God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.
The hope that Christmas brings us isn’t a fool’s hope. A hope that tries to pretend things aren’t how they really are.
It’s the hope that looks realistically at our stories and says with Matthew – yes, there are problems, worries and concerns. But that’s not all there is.
For the everlasting light shines not only in the dark streets of Bethlehem, but the dark alleyways of our souls. And the darkness can never put it out.
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Advent 2 - Putting a Face to the Name
Throughout the course of history some venues or stadia have become renowned as fearsome places to perform. The Coliseum in Rome; The Nou Camp or the Bernabeau in Spain. Old Trafford – home of Manchester United. Otherwise known as the Theatre of Muppets.
And the Glasgow Empire was a notoriously tough gig, especially if you were an English Comedian. They used to joke that it was a theatre where no turn was left unstoned.
But nothing, nothing compares to the bear-pit that is the secondary school assembly. It’s a place where even angels fear to tread. 200 teenagers there under sufferance, and you – the minister – are in the spotlight.
The writer and pastor J John talks about one Easter Assembly when he foolishly opened things up for questions and one lad said “all this religion stuff’s rubbish – you’ve never seen God, have you?” That would have thrown most of us, but to his credit, J John held his nerve and said “No – you’re quite right. I haven’t seen him. But I would have seen him if I’d been alive at the right time”.
I've always thought that was a good answer because it gets right to the heart of what Christians think was going on in that stable in Bethlehem. This wasn’t just the birth of a great person. This was God entering our world in human form. God putting a face to the name.
So if we’d been around at the time, we would have seen God – God with his face on. But I wonder if we’d have known it.
If Mary’d headed off to the Jerusalem Royal Infirmary instead of the stable, would we have been able to pick Jesus out from among the two dozen scrawny babes born that night? I doubt it. He didn’t have a halo. There was no Ready-Brek glow about him.
When he came to mend your rafters, or deliver that table and chairs he’d knocked together for you, would you have known straight away that this carpenter was the Son of God?
I don’t think so. Even his disciples found it hard to figure him out, and they spent almost every moment with him for a full three years. It was only after the resurrection that they really cottoned on.
There’s no guarantee we’d have been any different. Most people didn’t get it. Some got it badly wrong. The High Priest cursed him and slapped his face; Pilate looked him in the eye and still sent him to his death; the Roman guards toyed with him and thrashed him to within an inch of his life before crucifying him.
And all that shows is that it must have been easy to miss the God part of the man who was God.
But the thing is, some saw it.
Luke tells us the shepherds returned to their fields rejoicing because of what they’d seen and heard; Matthew says that when the wise men finally tracked him down, they knelt down in the muck in their fine robes and worshipped him.
So how come they saw? What’s the difference between them and the rest? Do they have God-tinted-glasses or something?
I think the difference is very simple – these were the folk who went looking.
They went looking for him. They all did – everyone in the story who finds God in Jesus, first goes looking for him. The shepherds left their flocks; the wise men left their homeland; Mary left her reputation; Joseph left his pride; the disciples left their nets; the first Christians left the security of their Jewish or pagan culture. They all left something behind and went looking for God.
And we might well ask, “Why doesn’t God make it easier for us? Why doesn’t he just appear instead of having us look for him?”
And I guess there’s two answers to that –
Firstly – I believe he did appear, in Jesus, but most of us didn’t recognise him, but secondly, let’s give God some credit for knowing what he’s doing here!
Isn’t it the case that everything worth having in life is something you have to go looking for?
You want to learn how to play guitar? You can’t do it without practice.
You want to enjoy the view from the mountain? You can’t do it from your sofa
You want to get fitter? You can’t do it without expending some energy.
You want to own something? Short of winning the lottery or turning to a life of crime, you have to work for it.
Is it the same kind of thing with the incarnation? Is God saying “I know what I’ll do. I’ll come in disguise – that’ll sort out the sheep from the goats. I’ll come in such a way as you have to look hard to find me. And then I’ll see who really wants to know me”.
So here’s something to chew over as we finish. Over the years I’ve heard lots of people say “I don’t think there’s a God. He’s never spoken to me, anyway.”
In the light of the Christmas story, maybe the right response is “.... so what have you done to go looking for him, then?”.
And the Glasgow Empire was a notoriously tough gig, especially if you were an English Comedian. They used to joke that it was a theatre where no turn was left unstoned.
But nothing, nothing compares to the bear-pit that is the secondary school assembly. It’s a place where even angels fear to tread. 200 teenagers there under sufferance, and you – the minister – are in the spotlight.
The writer and pastor J John talks about one Easter Assembly when he foolishly opened things up for questions and one lad said “all this religion stuff’s rubbish – you’ve never seen God, have you?” That would have thrown most of us, but to his credit, J John held his nerve and said “No – you’re quite right. I haven’t seen him. But I would have seen him if I’d been alive at the right time”.
I've always thought that was a good answer because it gets right to the heart of what Christians think was going on in that stable in Bethlehem. This wasn’t just the birth of a great person. This was God entering our world in human form. God putting a face to the name.
So if we’d been around at the time, we would have seen God – God with his face on. But I wonder if we’d have known it.
If Mary’d headed off to the Jerusalem Royal Infirmary instead of the stable, would we have been able to pick Jesus out from among the two dozen scrawny babes born that night? I doubt it. He didn’t have a halo. There was no Ready-Brek glow about him.
When he came to mend your rafters, or deliver that table and chairs he’d knocked together for you, would you have known straight away that this carpenter was the Son of God?
I don’t think so. Even his disciples found it hard to figure him out, and they spent almost every moment with him for a full three years. It was only after the resurrection that they really cottoned on.
There’s no guarantee we’d have been any different. Most people didn’t get it. Some got it badly wrong. The High Priest cursed him and slapped his face; Pilate looked him in the eye and still sent him to his death; the Roman guards toyed with him and thrashed him to within an inch of his life before crucifying him.
And all that shows is that it must have been easy to miss the God part of the man who was God.
But the thing is, some saw it.
Luke tells us the shepherds returned to their fields rejoicing because of what they’d seen and heard; Matthew says that when the wise men finally tracked him down, they knelt down in the muck in their fine robes and worshipped him.
So how come they saw? What’s the difference between them and the rest? Do they have God-tinted-glasses or something?
I think the difference is very simple – these were the folk who went looking.
They went looking for him. They all did – everyone in the story who finds God in Jesus, first goes looking for him. The shepherds left their flocks; the wise men left their homeland; Mary left her reputation; Joseph left his pride; the disciples left their nets; the first Christians left the security of their Jewish or pagan culture. They all left something behind and went looking for God.
And we might well ask, “Why doesn’t God make it easier for us? Why doesn’t he just appear instead of having us look for him?”
And I guess there’s two answers to that –
Firstly – I believe he did appear, in Jesus, but most of us didn’t recognise him, but secondly, let’s give God some credit for knowing what he’s doing here!
Isn’t it the case that everything worth having in life is something you have to go looking for?
You want to learn how to play guitar? You can’t do it without practice.
You want to enjoy the view from the mountain? You can’t do it from your sofa
You want to get fitter? You can’t do it without expending some energy.
You want to own something? Short of winning the lottery or turning to a life of crime, you have to work for it.
Is it the same kind of thing with the incarnation? Is God saying “I know what I’ll do. I’ll come in disguise – that’ll sort out the sheep from the goats. I’ll come in such a way as you have to look hard to find me. And then I’ll see who really wants to know me”.
So here’s something to chew over as we finish. Over the years I’ve heard lots of people say “I don’t think there’s a God. He’s never spoken to me, anyway.”
In the light of the Christmas story, maybe the right response is “.... so what have you done to go looking for him, then?”.
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Advent 1 - When Enough Is Enough - Luke 1:26-38
I want to describe a moment to you that you’ve seen a hundred times before.
You’ve seen it in films and TV dramas so often that it’s almost become hackneyed.
Here’s the scene –
Two people are in some kind of peril – usually a guy and a girl - and they’re running for their lives. They turn a corner, or burst out of the forest, or race to the edge of the skyscraper but suddenly there’s nowhere left to go. You can hear the baddies getting closer. The game’s up.
But it never is.
Because there’s always some way out that involves dangling over the edge of the skyscraper, or swinging across the chasm, and there’s always this moment when the guy’s gearing up for action and turns round to see that the poor girl’s terrified. So he looks at her calmly, reaches out his hand and says ‘trust me’. And she always does. And they always get away.
Could be Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford or Shia Labouf. Could be Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher or Megan Fox. They’ve all done it, and they’ll keep doing it ‘til kingdom come.
But rather than any particular movie star, it’s that particular moment I want you to hold on to in your imagination this morning; that meeting of the eyes; that reaching out of the hand; that decision to trust despite the terrible danger.
I think there’s something about Mary that fits with that picture.
What we really know about Mary would comfortably fit onto one side of A4 paper, but getting to the truth of who she was isn’t easy, because that one sheet of A4 has been papered over and papered over with layers of theology and interpretation and art, and it takes a lot of work to strip away everything that’s been added to her story over the centuries.
Here’s a good example of that – I’ve shown you this picture before. It’s Botticelli’s painting of the Annunciation, which was finished in 1490. And it’s one of my favourites - I’ve seen it with my own eyes in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. But note the nice Italian architecture and clothes. Note the pale skinned, fair haired Mary. This is 15th Century Florence we’re looking at; not 1st century Palestine!
And look at her body language. She looks like she’s about to faint, doesn’t she? She looks like someone who’s utterly passive. Someone to whom something is being done.
And I’m not sure that’s what the text implies. I think Mary’s much stronger than we give her credit for sometimes.
And that’s why I’ve always preferred the next picture. She’s young, she’s dark, she’s in a house that looks like it might belong to her time and place. So it’s far more authentic.
But the thing I like best about it is that she’s looking up at the angel. Most other paintings of the Annunciation have her turning her eyes away. But not this one. This Mary’s not passive. She’s frightened. She’s questioning. But she’s an active participant in whatever’s going on. And that’s far more in keeping with how Luke tells the story.
We know enough about the culture of those days to know that Mary would have been in her early teens – maybe even as young as 12. When a girl reached puberty and her parents had arranged a suitable partner for her, she was betrothed to him in a public ceremony, but she’d continue living with her parents. Officially she was married, but the marriage wasn’t consummated ‘til a second ceremony had taken place about a year later, after which she went to live with her husband.
During that year of betrothal, a man could divorce his wife for a number of reasons, but the most common was if she were found to be pregnant. In a culture where male honour was paramount, and the whole of society was engineered around the preservation of honour, for a betrothed girl to fall pregnant was shameful, both for her own family and that of her husband.
Worse still, if she fell pregnant to someone other than her husband. That was about as shameful as you could get.
Matthew’s gospel fills in some of the background that Luke misses out when it comes to Joseph’s attitude to all this, and it’s clear right from the start that as far as he’s concerned, divorce is the only option. There was no question of him putting up with this.
Joseph’s dilemma was whether to divorce Mary quietly, or make sure that everyone around knew that he’d wasn’t the father. There was no question of staying with her until he had his own encounter with God.
So given that strict cultural setting, can you imagine what must have gone through her mind when the angel said “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God has been gracious to you. You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus” ?
She knew straightaway this wasn’t about looking into the future when she and Joseph started living together. This was now. And if it was now, it was all wrong. She knew how much disgrace she’d bring on herself and everyone she loved if she were found to be pregnant.
That’s why she protested and said “How can this be?”. I’m chaste – I’m faithful. This isn’t in the script.
And at that point Gabriel helpfully pulled out a laptop and showed her a ten minute Powerpoint Presentation on what exactly was going to happen on a genetic level so that the divine son, fully God and fully man, could be conceived within her womb. And wouldn’t we all like a copy of that particular CD?
In fact, all he said was “The Spirit will be upon you, and God’s power will rest on you”. No DNA analysis, I’m afraid. Just a promise and some reassurance. And a reminder that strange baby stuff was happening to her cousin Elizabeth too, if she needed someone to talk to. Elizabeth had been barren all her life, but was now six months pregnant with the baby boy who grew up to be John the Baptist.
So there’s wee Mary, sitting safely at home in one sense, but teetering on the edge of a precipice in another. She’s scared to go on, and she’s scared to go back. But there’s this angel looking at her, and holding out his hand. And she knows that the way he wants to take her – God wants to take her – is fraught with danger. But she’s seen enough and she’s heard enough to know that she can trust him.
She doesn’t know how on earth all of this is going to work out. But she has enough faith to believe that it will.
“I am the Lord’s servant” she says; “May it happen to me as you have said”. That’s not a meek surrender. That’s a life-changing and courageous choice.
**********************************************
In other traditions Mary’s described as the Mother of God, and personally I’ve always found that too much to claim. It’s a title I don’t think she’d welcome.
But Mary’s certainly the mother of God incarnate – and in a way she’s also the mother of all who choose the way of faith.
She didn’t know where it was all going, but she’d seen enough and heard enough to trust that God would see her through. And that’s an example that should encourage us, because it’s not easy being a believer in today’s world.
We’re not an endangered species just yet, but we’re certainly a rare breed. And as the folk around us become more and more removed from the Christian story, we can expect less and less understanding of what we’re really about.
They just won’t get it.
And sometimes that’ll come out in the form of mild abuse and mick-taking. And other times, usually when folk are alone or slightly the worse for wear, it’ll come out in genuine questioning. Some of the best conversations I’ve had about faith have taken place when friends or flatmates have drunk just enough to lose some of their inhibitions.
And the worst thing we can do when we find ourselves having to explain why we believe and what we believe is to try and pretend we’ve got all the answers, because we don’t. None of us have, no matter how long we’ve been Christians for.
And neither did Mary. She didn’t know where on earth all of this was leading. But she’d seen enough to know it was worth staking the rest of her life on.
She looked God in the eye; she took his outstretched hand, and she went for it.
And so must we.
You’ve seen it in films and TV dramas so often that it’s almost become hackneyed.
Here’s the scene –
Two people are in some kind of peril – usually a guy and a girl - and they’re running for their lives. They turn a corner, or burst out of the forest, or race to the edge of the skyscraper but suddenly there’s nowhere left to go. You can hear the baddies getting closer. The game’s up.
But it never is.
Because there’s always some way out that involves dangling over the edge of the skyscraper, or swinging across the chasm, and there’s always this moment when the guy’s gearing up for action and turns round to see that the poor girl’s terrified. So he looks at her calmly, reaches out his hand and says ‘trust me’. And she always does. And they always get away.
Could be Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford or Shia Labouf. Could be Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher or Megan Fox. They’ve all done it, and they’ll keep doing it ‘til kingdom come.
But rather than any particular movie star, it’s that particular moment I want you to hold on to in your imagination this morning; that meeting of the eyes; that reaching out of the hand; that decision to trust despite the terrible danger.
I think there’s something about Mary that fits with that picture.
What we really know about Mary would comfortably fit onto one side of A4 paper, but getting to the truth of who she was isn’t easy, because that one sheet of A4 has been papered over and papered over with layers of theology and interpretation and art, and it takes a lot of work to strip away everything that’s been added to her story over the centuries.
Here’s a good example of that – I’ve shown you this picture before. It’s Botticelli’s painting of the Annunciation, which was finished in 1490. And it’s one of my favourites - I’ve seen it with my own eyes in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. But note the nice Italian architecture and clothes. Note the pale skinned, fair haired Mary. This is 15th Century Florence we’re looking at; not 1st century Palestine!
And look at her body language. She looks like she’s about to faint, doesn’t she? She looks like someone who’s utterly passive. Someone to whom something is being done.
And I’m not sure that’s what the text implies. I think Mary’s much stronger than we give her credit for sometimes.
And that’s why I’ve always preferred the next picture. She’s young, she’s dark, she’s in a house that looks like it might belong to her time and place. So it’s far more authentic.
But the thing I like best about it is that she’s looking up at the angel. Most other paintings of the Annunciation have her turning her eyes away. But not this one. This Mary’s not passive. She’s frightened. She’s questioning. But she’s an active participant in whatever’s going on. And that’s far more in keeping with how Luke tells the story.
We know enough about the culture of those days to know that Mary would have been in her early teens – maybe even as young as 12. When a girl reached puberty and her parents had arranged a suitable partner for her, she was betrothed to him in a public ceremony, but she’d continue living with her parents. Officially she was married, but the marriage wasn’t consummated ‘til a second ceremony had taken place about a year later, after which she went to live with her husband.
During that year of betrothal, a man could divorce his wife for a number of reasons, but the most common was if she were found to be pregnant. In a culture where male honour was paramount, and the whole of society was engineered around the preservation of honour, for a betrothed girl to fall pregnant was shameful, both for her own family and that of her husband.
Worse still, if she fell pregnant to someone other than her husband. That was about as shameful as you could get.
Matthew’s gospel fills in some of the background that Luke misses out when it comes to Joseph’s attitude to all this, and it’s clear right from the start that as far as he’s concerned, divorce is the only option. There was no question of him putting up with this.
Joseph’s dilemma was whether to divorce Mary quietly, or make sure that everyone around knew that he’d wasn’t the father. There was no question of staying with her until he had his own encounter with God.
So given that strict cultural setting, can you imagine what must have gone through her mind when the angel said “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God has been gracious to you. You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus” ?
She knew straightaway this wasn’t about looking into the future when she and Joseph started living together. This was now. And if it was now, it was all wrong. She knew how much disgrace she’d bring on herself and everyone she loved if she were found to be pregnant.
That’s why she protested and said “How can this be?”. I’m chaste – I’m faithful. This isn’t in the script.
And at that point Gabriel helpfully pulled out a laptop and showed her a ten minute Powerpoint Presentation on what exactly was going to happen on a genetic level so that the divine son, fully God and fully man, could be conceived within her womb. And wouldn’t we all like a copy of that particular CD?
In fact, all he said was “The Spirit will be upon you, and God’s power will rest on you”. No DNA analysis, I’m afraid. Just a promise and some reassurance. And a reminder that strange baby stuff was happening to her cousin Elizabeth too, if she needed someone to talk to. Elizabeth had been barren all her life, but was now six months pregnant with the baby boy who grew up to be John the Baptist.
So there’s wee Mary, sitting safely at home in one sense, but teetering on the edge of a precipice in another. She’s scared to go on, and she’s scared to go back. But there’s this angel looking at her, and holding out his hand. And she knows that the way he wants to take her – God wants to take her – is fraught with danger. But she’s seen enough and she’s heard enough to know that she can trust him.
She doesn’t know how on earth all of this is going to work out. But she has enough faith to believe that it will.
“I am the Lord’s servant” she says; “May it happen to me as you have said”. That’s not a meek surrender. That’s a life-changing and courageous choice.
**********************************************
In other traditions Mary’s described as the Mother of God, and personally I’ve always found that too much to claim. It’s a title I don’t think she’d welcome.
But Mary’s certainly the mother of God incarnate – and in a way she’s also the mother of all who choose the way of faith.
She didn’t know where it was all going, but she’d seen enough and heard enough to trust that God would see her through. And that’s an example that should encourage us, because it’s not easy being a believer in today’s world.
We’re not an endangered species just yet, but we’re certainly a rare breed. And as the folk around us become more and more removed from the Christian story, we can expect less and less understanding of what we’re really about.
They just won’t get it.
And sometimes that’ll come out in the form of mild abuse and mick-taking. And other times, usually when folk are alone or slightly the worse for wear, it’ll come out in genuine questioning. Some of the best conversations I’ve had about faith have taken place when friends or flatmates have drunk just enough to lose some of their inhibitions.
And the worst thing we can do when we find ourselves having to explain why we believe and what we believe is to try and pretend we’ve got all the answers, because we don’t. None of us have, no matter how long we’ve been Christians for.
And neither did Mary. She didn’t know where on earth all of this was leading. But she’d seen enough to know it was worth staking the rest of her life on.
She looked God in the eye; she took his outstretched hand, and she went for it.
And so must we.
Monday, 23 November 2009
First Things First - Psalm 127
Remember those long car journeys with the kids you’d have now and again?
Five miles down the road and they’d be saying “Are we there yet”?
We all know that in those circumstances, a wee break can make all the difference.
And that’s why, today, we’re pulling into a lay-by and getting out the picnic hamper, because we’re half-way through the Psalms of the Ascent and we still have a long way to go before we reach Jerusalem.
Psalm 127 is where we pause for a break today, and it’s a great Psalm to have in our minds as we get ready for the build up to Christmas and all the mayhem that goes with it.
This Psalm’s written in the style of King Solomon, who’s thought to have written the book of Ecclesiastes and the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. Solomon was a master of the pithy saying and that’s what comes through strongly in this Psalm. It’s just good, basic, spiritual common-sense aimed at the worshipping community.
So what’s the Psalmist saying?
“If the Lord does not build the house, the work of the builders is useless;
if the Lord does not protect the city, it is useless for the sentries to stand guard.
It is useless to work so hard for a living,
getting up early and going to bed late.
For the Lord provides for those he loves while they are asleep.”
I wonder if that sounds the same to your ears as to mine?
When I first read that I found myself remembering a story about an old man who was very proud of his garden. When the minister stopped by one afternoon he got the tour, but all he said on the way round was “isn’t God’s work marvellous”. And that got under the old man’s skin, because he knew fine well how long it took him to get the garden looking like that.
At the end of the tour the minister said “Well, Jimmy, you and God have done wonderful things here”. And the old boy said “Aye – you’re right enough. I suppose we have. But you want to see the mess of the place when I leave it all up to him”.
The Psalmist is not suggesting here that we down tools and leave it all up to God, or that we take ourselves off to bed, content in the knowledge that all our needs will be miraculously provided for.
That’s not Biblical – there’s a strong current in scripture that says if you do not work, you shall not eat. Work’s part of the equation.
What he’s getting at here is something deeper and profoundly counter-cultural.
He’s saying it doesn’t matter how hard you work - if you leave God out of things you won’t find what you’re soul’s looking for.
You’ve got to get first things first. And God should always be first.
God, then relationships, then work. That’s the way it should go,
Love God, love your neighbour. Then get on with whatever it is you do in life. That’s all. God, relationships, work – in that order.
But the thing is, our culture is doing its damnedest to reverse that order. Work, then relationships, then, if there’s any time left over, God. It’s a complete reversal of the way things should be.
Where does that come from? Well, Genesis gives us an answer.
There’s Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. And God says “Make sure you get your five a day. But not from that tree, please”.
But the story says they didn’t listen because the apples looked good. The woman took the fruit – note that – the woman! – and gave it to the man who meekly ate because he didn’t dare complain when she’d gone to all the trouble of choosing it and picking it and shining it up for him. And he knew that if he complained it’d be the last time she’d reach him an apple….
So they ate. And their eyes were opened, we’re told. And two things of significance happened. Firstly they were cursed. Eve was told she’d struggle in childbirth, and Adam was told he’d have to work hard all of his life in order to make a living. And now, with more women in the workplacee, the ladies get a double whammy with that piece of good news.
Secondly, that act of disobedience brought a distance between humanity and God. Paradoxically, their eyes were opened, but God became harder to see. and harder to hear. Sin got in the way.
So in the story of the fall, God goes out of focus, and at the same time, work becomes more of a focus.
Fast forward a few centuries.
You’re looking down over a great plain where men are moving across the landscape like ants, dragging logs and carts full of bricks. A great tower’s rising from within a frame of scaffolding, already taller than anything that’s ever been built so far. They’re really putting their backs into it. Why? So they can make a name for themselves. So, through their work, they can finally prove themselves independent of God. They want to prove that they are self-made, autonomous people.
Do you see what’s happened in just a few short years? It started out as God, relationships work; but then came the fall. And by the time we reach Babel the pattern’s completely reversed. It’s become work, relationships, God. If God’s even there at all.
And that’s where we’re at in our society. We’re still building Babels. Still kidding ourselves that if we can just work a little bit harder, get a little bit more money, buy a few more of those things we think we need, then we’ll really have arrived. We’ll be the gods of our own lives. Self-made men and women.
That thinking has deep, deep roots that go right down into our culture. We’ve swallowed the lie so completely that to live in any other way makes us feel totally out of synch with the rest of society.
But that’s the worldview that the Psalmist’s critiquing.
Why are you sweating over building a house, when what you really want is a home? No point having a Beverley Hills mansion if the life you live in it’s miserable.
Why are you stressing out over security when what you’re yearning for is real community? If we tried harder to accept each other and look after each other maybe we wouldn’t need gated communities and security guards with guns.
Why are you wasting your best years amassing wealth, when you know very well that money can’t buy you happiness? Isn’t that the one thing the tabloid press is good for, apart from holding fish and chips? Showing us that money’s no guarantee of happiness.
How many people do you know who leave God aside and give their lives over to work and accumulation, ostensibly to provide from their families, and then find themselves deeply unhappy further down the line because they haven’t delivered the freedom they were supposed to? All that time invested in work and furnishing the 'dream' home, but not nearly enough in relationships or in God. And then they wonder why things crumble....
First things first, says God. I know you need these things. but don’t live for them. Don’t make them your God. Seek first my kingdom and my righteousness and all these other things shall be added unto you.
Make room for me, says God. Make time for me. There is nothing more important you can do.
“But I don’t have time, God” we say.
“Sure you do” says God.
"You have the same amount of time as anybody else. The question is, how are you using it?"
That is the question.
Is it work-relationships-God, or God-relationships-work?
How are we living? How are we using the time we’ve been blessed with? Is God building the house, or are we labouring in vain?
As we move toward the season of Advent that’s a good question to ponder.
Traditionally Advent was a time for slowing down and reflecting on the enormity of what happened on that first Christmas. It was a time for personal reflection and prayer to help us get back in kilter with God and ourselves.
And we can make it that again; but only if we choose to.
We have the time. What we need is the will to use it well. To get first things first.
I want to finish with a reading from the French priest and writer Michel Quoist. It’s simply entitled “Lord, I have time”.
I went out, Lord.
People were coming out.
They were coming and going,
Walking and running.
Everything was rushing, cars, lorries, the street, the whole town.
People were rushing not to waste time.
They were rushing after time,
To catch up with time,
To gain time.
Goodbye, sir, excuse me, I haven't time.
I'll come back, I can't wait, I haven't time.
I must end this letter - I haven't time.
I'd love to help you, but I haven't time.
I can't accept, having no time.
I can't think, I can't read, I'm swamped, I haven't time.
I'd like to pray, but I haven't time.
You understand, Lord, they simply haven't the time.
The child is playing, he hasn't time right now. Later on…..
The schoolgirl has her homework to do, she hasn't time….. Later on…
The student has his courses, and so much work, he hasn't time. . .Later on...
The young man is at his sports, he hasn't time . . . Later on . . .
The young woman has her new house, or new baby she hasn't time. .....Later on.
The workers are busy making their way in life……. Later on.
The grandparents have to look after the grandchildren, they haven't time. . ... Later on...
They are ill, they have their hospital appointments, they haven't time . . ....Later on...
They are dying, they have no . . .
Too late! . . . They have no more time!
And so all people run after time, Lord.
They pass through life running - hurried, jostled, overburdened,
frantic, and they never get there. They haven't time.
In spite of all their efforts they're still short of time,
of a great deal of time.
Lord, you must have made a mistake in your calculations,
There is a big mistake somewhere.
The hours are too short,
The days are too short,
Our lives are too short.
You who are beyond time, Lord, you smile to see us fighting it.
And you know what you are doing.
You make no mistakes in your distribution of time to people.
You give each one time to do what you want them to do.
But we must not lose time
waste time,
kill time,
For time is a gift that you give us,
But a perishable gift,
A gift that does not keep.
Lord, I have time,
I have plenty of time,
All the time that you give me,
The years of my life,
The days of my years,
The hours of my days,
They are all mine.
Mine to fill, quietly, calmly,
But to fill completely, up to the brim,
To offer them to you,
that of their insipid water
You may make a rich wine such as you made once in Cana of Galilee.
I am not asking you for time to do this and then that,
But your grace to do conscientiously,
in the time that you give me,
what you want me to do.
Five miles down the road and they’d be saying “Are we there yet”?
We all know that in those circumstances, a wee break can make all the difference.
And that’s why, today, we’re pulling into a lay-by and getting out the picnic hamper, because we’re half-way through the Psalms of the Ascent and we still have a long way to go before we reach Jerusalem.
Psalm 127 is where we pause for a break today, and it’s a great Psalm to have in our minds as we get ready for the build up to Christmas and all the mayhem that goes with it.
This Psalm’s written in the style of King Solomon, who’s thought to have written the book of Ecclesiastes and the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. Solomon was a master of the pithy saying and that’s what comes through strongly in this Psalm. It’s just good, basic, spiritual common-sense aimed at the worshipping community.
So what’s the Psalmist saying?
“If the Lord does not build the house, the work of the builders is useless;
if the Lord does not protect the city, it is useless for the sentries to stand guard.
It is useless to work so hard for a living,
getting up early and going to bed late.
For the Lord provides for those he loves while they are asleep.”
I wonder if that sounds the same to your ears as to mine?
When I first read that I found myself remembering a story about an old man who was very proud of his garden. When the minister stopped by one afternoon he got the tour, but all he said on the way round was “isn’t God’s work marvellous”. And that got under the old man’s skin, because he knew fine well how long it took him to get the garden looking like that.
At the end of the tour the minister said “Well, Jimmy, you and God have done wonderful things here”. And the old boy said “Aye – you’re right enough. I suppose we have. But you want to see the mess of the place when I leave it all up to him”.
The Psalmist is not suggesting here that we down tools and leave it all up to God, or that we take ourselves off to bed, content in the knowledge that all our needs will be miraculously provided for.
That’s not Biblical – there’s a strong current in scripture that says if you do not work, you shall not eat. Work’s part of the equation.
What he’s getting at here is something deeper and profoundly counter-cultural.
He’s saying it doesn’t matter how hard you work - if you leave God out of things you won’t find what you’re soul’s looking for.
You’ve got to get first things first. And God should always be first.
God, then relationships, then work. That’s the way it should go,
Love God, love your neighbour. Then get on with whatever it is you do in life. That’s all. God, relationships, work – in that order.
But the thing is, our culture is doing its damnedest to reverse that order. Work, then relationships, then, if there’s any time left over, God. It’s a complete reversal of the way things should be.
Where does that come from? Well, Genesis gives us an answer.
There’s Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. And God says “Make sure you get your five a day. But not from that tree, please”.
But the story says they didn’t listen because the apples looked good. The woman took the fruit – note that – the woman! – and gave it to the man who meekly ate because he didn’t dare complain when she’d gone to all the trouble of choosing it and picking it and shining it up for him. And he knew that if he complained it’d be the last time she’d reach him an apple….
So they ate. And their eyes were opened, we’re told. And two things of significance happened. Firstly they were cursed. Eve was told she’d struggle in childbirth, and Adam was told he’d have to work hard all of his life in order to make a living. And now, with more women in the workplacee, the ladies get a double whammy with that piece of good news.
Secondly, that act of disobedience brought a distance between humanity and God. Paradoxically, their eyes were opened, but God became harder to see. and harder to hear. Sin got in the way.
So in the story of the fall, God goes out of focus, and at the same time, work becomes more of a focus.
Fast forward a few centuries.
You’re looking down over a great plain where men are moving across the landscape like ants, dragging logs and carts full of bricks. A great tower’s rising from within a frame of scaffolding, already taller than anything that’s ever been built so far. They’re really putting their backs into it. Why? So they can make a name for themselves. So, through their work, they can finally prove themselves independent of God. They want to prove that they are self-made, autonomous people.
Do you see what’s happened in just a few short years? It started out as God, relationships work; but then came the fall. And by the time we reach Babel the pattern’s completely reversed. It’s become work, relationships, God. If God’s even there at all.
And that’s where we’re at in our society. We’re still building Babels. Still kidding ourselves that if we can just work a little bit harder, get a little bit more money, buy a few more of those things we think we need, then we’ll really have arrived. We’ll be the gods of our own lives. Self-made men and women.
That thinking has deep, deep roots that go right down into our culture. We’ve swallowed the lie so completely that to live in any other way makes us feel totally out of synch with the rest of society.
But that’s the worldview that the Psalmist’s critiquing.
Why are you sweating over building a house, when what you really want is a home? No point having a Beverley Hills mansion if the life you live in it’s miserable.
Why are you stressing out over security when what you’re yearning for is real community? If we tried harder to accept each other and look after each other maybe we wouldn’t need gated communities and security guards with guns.
Why are you wasting your best years amassing wealth, when you know very well that money can’t buy you happiness? Isn’t that the one thing the tabloid press is good for, apart from holding fish and chips? Showing us that money’s no guarantee of happiness.
How many people do you know who leave God aside and give their lives over to work and accumulation, ostensibly to provide from their families, and then find themselves deeply unhappy further down the line because they haven’t delivered the freedom they were supposed to? All that time invested in work and furnishing the 'dream' home, but not nearly enough in relationships or in God. And then they wonder why things crumble....
First things first, says God. I know you need these things. but don’t live for them. Don’t make them your God. Seek first my kingdom and my righteousness and all these other things shall be added unto you.
Make room for me, says God. Make time for me. There is nothing more important you can do.
“But I don’t have time, God” we say.
“Sure you do” says God.
"You have the same amount of time as anybody else. The question is, how are you using it?"
That is the question.
Is it work-relationships-God, or God-relationships-work?
How are we living? How are we using the time we’ve been blessed with? Is God building the house, or are we labouring in vain?
As we move toward the season of Advent that’s a good question to ponder.
Traditionally Advent was a time for slowing down and reflecting on the enormity of what happened on that first Christmas. It was a time for personal reflection and prayer to help us get back in kilter with God and ourselves.
And we can make it that again; but only if we choose to.
We have the time. What we need is the will to use it well. To get first things first.
I want to finish with a reading from the French priest and writer Michel Quoist. It’s simply entitled “Lord, I have time”.
I went out, Lord.
People were coming out.
They were coming and going,
Walking and running.
Everything was rushing, cars, lorries, the street, the whole town.
People were rushing not to waste time.
They were rushing after time,
To catch up with time,
To gain time.
Goodbye, sir, excuse me, I haven't time.
I'll come back, I can't wait, I haven't time.
I must end this letter - I haven't time.
I'd love to help you, but I haven't time.
I can't accept, having no time.
I can't think, I can't read, I'm swamped, I haven't time.
I'd like to pray, but I haven't time.
You understand, Lord, they simply haven't the time.
The child is playing, he hasn't time right now. Later on…..
The schoolgirl has her homework to do, she hasn't time….. Later on…
The student has his courses, and so much work, he hasn't time. . .Later on...
The young man is at his sports, he hasn't time . . . Later on . . .
The young woman has her new house, or new baby she hasn't time. .....Later on.
The workers are busy making their way in life……. Later on.
The grandparents have to look after the grandchildren, they haven't time. . ... Later on...
They are ill, they have their hospital appointments, they haven't time . . ....Later on...
They are dying, they have no . . .
Too late! . . . They have no more time!
And so all people run after time, Lord.
They pass through life running - hurried, jostled, overburdened,
frantic, and they never get there. They haven't time.
In spite of all their efforts they're still short of time,
of a great deal of time.
Lord, you must have made a mistake in your calculations,
There is a big mistake somewhere.
The hours are too short,
The days are too short,
Our lives are too short.
You who are beyond time, Lord, you smile to see us fighting it.
And you know what you are doing.
You make no mistakes in your distribution of time to people.
You give each one time to do what you want them to do.
But we must not lose time
waste time,
kill time,
For time is a gift that you give us,
But a perishable gift,
A gift that does not keep.
Lord, I have time,
I have plenty of time,
All the time that you give me,
The years of my life,
The days of my years,
The hours of my days,
They are all mine.
Mine to fill, quietly, calmly,
But to fill completely, up to the brim,
To offer them to you,
that of their insipid water
You may make a rich wine such as you made once in Cana of Galilee.
I am not asking you for time to do this and then that,
But your grace to do conscientiously,
in the time that you give me,
what you want me to do.
The Reality Behind the Reality - Psalm 126
I can’t place the day, but I remember the experience very clearly.
It was just a few weeks after I arrived at Belhelvie and I’d gone down to the beach for a run on a glorious May morning.
I had the place to myself; the sky was blue, the wind was fresh, the sun was warm, the waves were crashing in. It seemed like there was no better place in the world to be, in that moment. And just for a second I allowed myself to act like an American and went galloping along the sand punching the air and shouting ‘wahoo’ like an idiot. Like I said - there was no-one else around to see!
I couldn’t quite believe that I was here. After the all the soul-searching and discussion, all the interviews and assessments, all the busyness of moving and settling down, we were finally here in the place we’d been called to. And it felt good.
Especially given what had gone before.
18 months prior to that run on the beach, I remember sitting at our kitchen table in Glasgow with a few trusted friends, feeling about as low as I’ve ever felt in my 40-odd years.
It was a winter’s evening – dark outside; but dark inside too; in my soul. I’d just about come to the end of myself.
Describing it all would take too long and I’ll spare you the detail, but to cut a long story short I was within a whisker of having to be signed off my work with stress.
I was in a pioneering kind of job within the church, working in a deprived part of the inner-city. There was no script to follow because I was working outwith the normal structures of the church and immersing myself in the community in different ways. And there was lots of that work that was going well.
But two things were gradually wearing me down. The politicking around the three churches I was working with, and finding myself stretched more and more thinly across too many things. I did a little time and motion study over a few months and discovered that 60-70 hour weeks had been the norm; and of course there’s no overtime in ministry.
Four years into the post, and all of the life had sapped out of me. I had nothing left to give to anyone.
We’d gathered those friends together that evening to help me think through some strategies to make things better, and to pray.
And no miracles happened that night; but their good sense and understanding were the beginnings of a recovery.
And in God’s timing, and God’s grace, that recovery led me here.
And I’m wise enough now, five years in, to know that Belhelvie Church is no Utopia. But there’s no doubt that I’m in a better place than I was.
It’s a before-and-after story, I guess.
And so is today’s Psalm.
But to make sense of what he’s writing, you need a little bit of background.
What you see on the screen is the story of the people of Israel in miniature. It’s the Old Testament squeezed into one slide.
(Image of sine wave. The peaks are labelled ‘Patriarchs, Promised Land, Return and Messiah’, the troughs, ‘Slavery (Egypt), Exile (Assyria and Babylon), and Occupation (latterly, Rome)).
I then ad-libbed the story of Israel over a couple of minutes, charting these peaks and troughs with specific reference to:
Patriarchs – Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – Joseph
Slavery in Egypt – Moses leads them out and into
Promised Land – Good kings (David) – Bad Kings - Kingdom divided – Israel, Judah,
Exile – Assyria and Babylon (722 and 586BC)
Return – 70 years later, King Cyrus of Persia – temple and walls rebuilt (Ezra and Nehemiah). Exiles returned Home
Occupation – by more powerful nations. Latterly Rome
Messiah.
So having had that background, we’re in a better place to understand what’s going on in this Psalm:
Psalm 126 v 1: “When the Lord brought us back to Jerusalem, it was like a dream”.
What’s he talking about there? Promised land? More likely Return after the exile. “brought us back”.
verses 1-3 are looking back on that. Past tense. But where is he now?
Further down the curve. V4 – “Lord, make us prosperous again”.
Weeping because they’re back in hard times again!
Psalmist is sitting there in a dark place, and he has a decision to make. What am I going to do here? Am I going to accept that things are the way they are and give up, or am I going to believe that they can change? Am I going to settle for this reality, or am I going to look for the reality behind the reality?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
When I sat with those friends around the kitchen table in Glasgow, that’s what they were helping me do. See the reality behind the reality.
The reality was that I was lower than a snake’s belly and feeling like packing it all in. The reality behind the reality was that God didn’t want me that way and couldn’t use me that way, I hadn’t been looking after myself properly; I’d been working far too hard, and I’d stopped making time to be with the God who’d called me into ministry in the first place.
And when I put that right, I began to understand that the skills I have were better suited to parish ministry than pioneering ministry.
Hard to accept, but liberating to discover.
The Psalmist’s reality was being back in Jerusalem after exile and realising that things weren’t going to be plain sailing. The reality behind the reality was this sine wave of history that his people had lived through, and the fact that at every stage, God had been faithful to them and brought them through their difficulties. And that gave him hope. If God could do it once, he could do it again.
Do you see where we’re going with this?
Behind all our realities, there’s another reality; a divine reality that’s real and present, but unseen until we start looking for it.
It’s a bit like an iceberg. The parts we see sticking up above the water are only a fraction of what’s really there under the surface. They’re not the whole thing, any more than our present experience and how we happen to feel about it is the whole thing.
There’s always more. A reality behind whatever reality it is we’re facing. A reality that gets God in his proper place, and helps us see things from a different perspective.
So there’s that person you can’t stand at work. Or down your street. Or in the church. That’s a reality.
But the reality behind the reality is that that person’s known and loved by God, and there are reasons that they’ve turned out the way they are. What are you going to do with that? If you call yourself a Christian you can’t just ignore that and get on with disliking them. You have to find a way to live with that – and deal with them. That’s what God wants you to do, and can help you do - if you let him,
Or there’s that knock you’ve taken. A real body-blow. You put a brave face on it, but deep down, you’re shaken to the core. And you wonder why God let it happen. That’s a reality you live with every day of life.
But the reality behind the reality is that things happen in this world which aren’t part of the divine plan. And when those things happen, it’s always better to run toward God than away from him. Whatever you’ve gone through, other men and women have gone through the same and worse and kept their faith, It can be done. The Psalms show us that. They’re full of people pouring out this stuff to God, and in the silence that follows, finding the beginnings of an answer.
I look at the church we belong to. One commentator cruelly described what’s happening in the Church of Scotland as “one ageing, dying congregation collapsing into the arms of another ageing, dying congregation”. In some places, that’s the reality. But the reality behind the reality is that we worship the God who raises the dead and delights in making all things new. Institutions may die; traditions might perish. But the Church of Jesus Christ goes on.
So, in closing, I wonder how all of that speaks to you this morning?
What’s the reality you live with just now? Are circumstances kind, or challenging? Is faith growing, or faltering?
What’s the reality behind the reality of your non-stop life, or your workaholism, or the difficulties you’re having in that relationship?
What’s the reality behind the reality of your worrying, or your stubbornness, or your doubts about yourself or God?
However you answer, the one thing I want you to take away from this morning is that our feelings and circumstances are not the last word on how things are. God is the page on which this sine wave of our lives is drawn. Whether we’re up or down, he is the reality behind our reality.
And when we wake up to that, and set ourselves to finding him in the middle of whatever’s going on in life, that’s when things begin to change, and change for the better.
That’s what I found out in that dark kitchen surrounded by those caring friends;
That’s what the Psalmist found out in Jerusalem, surrounded by those warring nations.
In every situation, there’s always more going on than we know. Just under the surface, God is at work, if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear.
It was just a few weeks after I arrived at Belhelvie and I’d gone down to the beach for a run on a glorious May morning.
I had the place to myself; the sky was blue, the wind was fresh, the sun was warm, the waves were crashing in. It seemed like there was no better place in the world to be, in that moment. And just for a second I allowed myself to act like an American and went galloping along the sand punching the air and shouting ‘wahoo’ like an idiot. Like I said - there was no-one else around to see!
I couldn’t quite believe that I was here. After the all the soul-searching and discussion, all the interviews and assessments, all the busyness of moving and settling down, we were finally here in the place we’d been called to. And it felt good.
Especially given what had gone before.
18 months prior to that run on the beach, I remember sitting at our kitchen table in Glasgow with a few trusted friends, feeling about as low as I’ve ever felt in my 40-odd years.
It was a winter’s evening – dark outside; but dark inside too; in my soul. I’d just about come to the end of myself.
Describing it all would take too long and I’ll spare you the detail, but to cut a long story short I was within a whisker of having to be signed off my work with stress.
I was in a pioneering kind of job within the church, working in a deprived part of the inner-city. There was no script to follow because I was working outwith the normal structures of the church and immersing myself in the community in different ways. And there was lots of that work that was going well.
But two things were gradually wearing me down. The politicking around the three churches I was working with, and finding myself stretched more and more thinly across too many things. I did a little time and motion study over a few months and discovered that 60-70 hour weeks had been the norm; and of course there’s no overtime in ministry.
Four years into the post, and all of the life had sapped out of me. I had nothing left to give to anyone.
We’d gathered those friends together that evening to help me think through some strategies to make things better, and to pray.
And no miracles happened that night; but their good sense and understanding were the beginnings of a recovery.
And in God’s timing, and God’s grace, that recovery led me here.
And I’m wise enough now, five years in, to know that Belhelvie Church is no Utopia. But there’s no doubt that I’m in a better place than I was.
It’s a before-and-after story, I guess.
And so is today’s Psalm.
But to make sense of what he’s writing, you need a little bit of background.
What you see on the screen is the story of the people of Israel in miniature. It’s the Old Testament squeezed into one slide.
(Image of sine wave. The peaks are labelled ‘Patriarchs, Promised Land, Return and Messiah’, the troughs, ‘Slavery (Egypt), Exile (Assyria and Babylon), and Occupation (latterly, Rome)).
I then ad-libbed the story of Israel over a couple of minutes, charting these peaks and troughs with specific reference to:
Patriarchs – Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – Joseph
Slavery in Egypt – Moses leads them out and into
Promised Land – Good kings (David) – Bad Kings - Kingdom divided – Israel, Judah,
Exile – Assyria and Babylon (722 and 586BC)
Return – 70 years later, King Cyrus of Persia – temple and walls rebuilt (Ezra and Nehemiah). Exiles returned Home
Occupation – by more powerful nations. Latterly Rome
Messiah.
So having had that background, we’re in a better place to understand what’s going on in this Psalm:
Psalm 126 v 1: “When the Lord brought us back to Jerusalem, it was like a dream”.
What’s he talking about there? Promised land? More likely Return after the exile. “brought us back”.
verses 1-3 are looking back on that. Past tense. But where is he now?
Further down the curve. V4 – “Lord, make us prosperous again”.
Weeping because they’re back in hard times again!
Psalmist is sitting there in a dark place, and he has a decision to make. What am I going to do here? Am I going to accept that things are the way they are and give up, or am I going to believe that they can change? Am I going to settle for this reality, or am I going to look for the reality behind the reality?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
When I sat with those friends around the kitchen table in Glasgow, that’s what they were helping me do. See the reality behind the reality.
The reality was that I was lower than a snake’s belly and feeling like packing it all in. The reality behind the reality was that God didn’t want me that way and couldn’t use me that way, I hadn’t been looking after myself properly; I’d been working far too hard, and I’d stopped making time to be with the God who’d called me into ministry in the first place.
And when I put that right, I began to understand that the skills I have were better suited to parish ministry than pioneering ministry.
Hard to accept, but liberating to discover.
The Psalmist’s reality was being back in Jerusalem after exile and realising that things weren’t going to be plain sailing. The reality behind the reality was this sine wave of history that his people had lived through, and the fact that at every stage, God had been faithful to them and brought them through their difficulties. And that gave him hope. If God could do it once, he could do it again.
Do you see where we’re going with this?
Behind all our realities, there’s another reality; a divine reality that’s real and present, but unseen until we start looking for it.
It’s a bit like an iceberg. The parts we see sticking up above the water are only a fraction of what’s really there under the surface. They’re not the whole thing, any more than our present experience and how we happen to feel about it is the whole thing.
There’s always more. A reality behind whatever reality it is we’re facing. A reality that gets God in his proper place, and helps us see things from a different perspective.
So there’s that person you can’t stand at work. Or down your street. Or in the church. That’s a reality.
But the reality behind the reality is that that person’s known and loved by God, and there are reasons that they’ve turned out the way they are. What are you going to do with that? If you call yourself a Christian you can’t just ignore that and get on with disliking them. You have to find a way to live with that – and deal with them. That’s what God wants you to do, and can help you do - if you let him,
Or there’s that knock you’ve taken. A real body-blow. You put a brave face on it, but deep down, you’re shaken to the core. And you wonder why God let it happen. That’s a reality you live with every day of life.
But the reality behind the reality is that things happen in this world which aren’t part of the divine plan. And when those things happen, it’s always better to run toward God than away from him. Whatever you’ve gone through, other men and women have gone through the same and worse and kept their faith, It can be done. The Psalms show us that. They’re full of people pouring out this stuff to God, and in the silence that follows, finding the beginnings of an answer.
I look at the church we belong to. One commentator cruelly described what’s happening in the Church of Scotland as “one ageing, dying congregation collapsing into the arms of another ageing, dying congregation”. In some places, that’s the reality. But the reality behind the reality is that we worship the God who raises the dead and delights in making all things new. Institutions may die; traditions might perish. But the Church of Jesus Christ goes on.
So, in closing, I wonder how all of that speaks to you this morning?
What’s the reality you live with just now? Are circumstances kind, or challenging? Is faith growing, or faltering?
What’s the reality behind the reality of your non-stop life, or your workaholism, or the difficulties you’re having in that relationship?
What’s the reality behind the reality of your worrying, or your stubbornness, or your doubts about yourself or God?
However you answer, the one thing I want you to take away from this morning is that our feelings and circumstances are not the last word on how things are. God is the page on which this sine wave of our lives is drawn. Whether we’re up or down, he is the reality behind our reality.
And when we wake up to that, and set ourselves to finding him in the middle of whatever’s going on in life, that’s when things begin to change, and change for the better.
That’s what I found out in that dark kitchen surrounded by those caring friends;
That’s what the Psalmist found out in Jerusalem, surrounded by those warring nations.
In every situation, there’s always more going on than we know. Just under the surface, God is at work, if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear.
A Remembering and a Reckoning - Psalm 125
His name was George, and I had a hard time tracking him down.
He stayed in the outskirts of Possilpark in Glasgow where the dingy flats finally give up chasing the countryside away, and sit sullenly looking out over the copses and scrubland to the Campsie Fells beyond.
He was a Mr Never-in, was George. I tried visiting three or four times in the space of a fortnight before I finally got him at home. And he was pleased to see me, I think. I was the new student minister in his church.
He was a tall man; stooped by age, but still lean in body and face. He spoke gently and though his smile was rare, it was always genuine. And he carried himself with the kind of dignity that men who’ve seen action often possess.
I remember sitting in his wee living room and looking around as he went to the kitchen to make a coffee. The haphazard collection of memorabilia on the walls and mantelpiece told their own story. Wedding photo. A family gathering. Grandchildren. A black and white image of a group of young soldiers standing by a jeep somewhere out in the desert. A young George looking back at me from a distance of sixty years.
Surrounded by memories, but alone with them now, as a widower of several years.
We passed an hour together, and to be honest I remember very little of what we spoke about. But I left that day with a strong sense that there were depths to George that I hadn’t begun to fathom.
A few weeks later it was Remembrance Sunday, and it was the tradition in that church that the oldest living combatant would bring the poppy wreath forward at the start of the service. For years that duty had fallen to an old soldier in his 90’s, but with his passing, the honour fell to George for the first time.
I remember him coming in as we were singing the first hymn, and making his way shakily down the aisle, and I was glad that only those of us at the front could see his face because he was just about holding it together.
It’s hard to find the words to sum up how he looked. That tall, kind man, now shaking like a leaf as he bent down to place the wreath before the communion table. His body was there, quivering, but his mind was a thousand miles away in some field, or forest or trench where he lost the friends he fought beside. You could see it in his eyes, and the tight set of his mouth.
He’d survived it. But he never spoke about it. We talked often in my times there, but this part of his life was off limits. And I think that very often that’s the way with men like George. It’s those who have seen most and lost most who talk the least.
Some things are hard to talk about - even when you remember
them well.
Get a group of veterans together and they’ll chat readily about the places they visited during the war, the people they served alongside, the practical jokes they played. But it’s rare to hear them talk about their experiences on the front line.
What they remember best - they tend not speak of.
It is hard to really talk about the details of what happened: the real costs:
how their comrades died; how their parents, or brothers or sisters, or friends paid the costs of war,
how their own minds and hearts were
affected and never quite the same again.
Our most important memories for the most part are silent ones. Ones that we don’t talk about because of the pain that still resides in them and because they’re almost impossible to share with anyone who has not been there with you.
This week I travelled across to Oban to take the funeral of my wife’s great Aunt who was very dear to us. She was from Lancashire and in the war years she served in an RAF radar station in Norfolk, charting the movements of enemy aircraft. She was full of stories of the camaraderie she found among the folk who worked there, and she stayed good friends with some of them for the rest of her life.
But we know that at one point the young man she loved, and was engaged to, left on a sortie and never came back. She hardly ever spoke about him. It was only in recent days that a little more of that story began to emerge, and only with one or two people.
Some memories are just too painful to revisit.
We keep them stored in a locked room in our mind.
Every now and again we’ll go in and sit in that place in silence for a while, and very occasionally,
if the mood and the company’s right, we might allow someone else to glimpse what’s in there.
But for the most part, those doors stay firmly closed.
And when it comes to this particular Sunday in the year, perhaps it’s right that they do.
Our culture has an almost pornographic obsession with putting everything on display;
but we all know that there are some things that shouldn’t be treated that way because exposure cheapens them. Some things deserve honour and privacy and respect.
We don’t need those who lived through the war as combatants or civilians to share all their innermost memories with us. There are moments when we can read their sorrows in their faces.
But it is important that those who were there, those who fought hard and made it home
feel that all that happened was worthwhile, that it made a difference, and that those who sacrificed so much, are given the honour and respect they deserve.
It is always the way that in times of peace, soldiers and sailors and airmen are undervalued.
But today we remember with gratitude the enormity of the sacrifices that they made in the two world wars so the tyrrany of nations could be ended.
We recognise that cost, and we honour today those who served and those who died,
for us, for our country, and for those who could not fight to save themselves.
War is not a part of God’s plan for this world.
The prophet Isaiah predicts a day when swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and the wolf will lie down in peace with the lamb.
And Christ teaches us to pray for God’s kingdom to come;
and war has no place in that future.
But those days have not yet come.
And as long as our human story is marred by dischord and greed - in other words, by sin -war will be an inevitable part of our landscape.
But we have this promise in the heart of today’s Psalm to hold onto.
God promises that “The wicked will not always rule over the land of the righteous”.
There will be a reckoning, God says, and evil shall not win.
And when we stand up against injustice and oppression,
against violence and tyrrany,
we are firmly within the expressed will of God.
Our prayers today are for the men and women who,
in taking that stand,
gave all that they had to give.
For them, we pray in the words of the Psalmist:
“Lord, do good to those who are good, to those who obey your commands”.
On this Remembrance Sunday, Psalm 125 reminds us that there will be a terrible reckoning for wrongdoing, but lasting reward for those who do the right.
Today we commemorate those who did right, and commit ourselves to follow their example in our day and age.
We will remember them.
He stayed in the outskirts of Possilpark in Glasgow where the dingy flats finally give up chasing the countryside away, and sit sullenly looking out over the copses and scrubland to the Campsie Fells beyond.
He was a Mr Never-in, was George. I tried visiting three or four times in the space of a fortnight before I finally got him at home. And he was pleased to see me, I think. I was the new student minister in his church.
He was a tall man; stooped by age, but still lean in body and face. He spoke gently and though his smile was rare, it was always genuine. And he carried himself with the kind of dignity that men who’ve seen action often possess.
I remember sitting in his wee living room and looking around as he went to the kitchen to make a coffee. The haphazard collection of memorabilia on the walls and mantelpiece told their own story. Wedding photo. A family gathering. Grandchildren. A black and white image of a group of young soldiers standing by a jeep somewhere out in the desert. A young George looking back at me from a distance of sixty years.
Surrounded by memories, but alone with them now, as a widower of several years.
We passed an hour together, and to be honest I remember very little of what we spoke about. But I left that day with a strong sense that there were depths to George that I hadn’t begun to fathom.
A few weeks later it was Remembrance Sunday, and it was the tradition in that church that the oldest living combatant would bring the poppy wreath forward at the start of the service. For years that duty had fallen to an old soldier in his 90’s, but with his passing, the honour fell to George for the first time.
I remember him coming in as we were singing the first hymn, and making his way shakily down the aisle, and I was glad that only those of us at the front could see his face because he was just about holding it together.
It’s hard to find the words to sum up how he looked. That tall, kind man, now shaking like a leaf as he bent down to place the wreath before the communion table. His body was there, quivering, but his mind was a thousand miles away in some field, or forest or trench where he lost the friends he fought beside. You could see it in his eyes, and the tight set of his mouth.
He’d survived it. But he never spoke about it. We talked often in my times there, but this part of his life was off limits. And I think that very often that’s the way with men like George. It’s those who have seen most and lost most who talk the least.
Some things are hard to talk about - even when you remember
them well.
Get a group of veterans together and they’ll chat readily about the places they visited during the war, the people they served alongside, the practical jokes they played. But it’s rare to hear them talk about their experiences on the front line.
What they remember best - they tend not speak of.
It is hard to really talk about the details of what happened: the real costs:
how their comrades died; how their parents, or brothers or sisters, or friends paid the costs of war,
how their own minds and hearts were
affected and never quite the same again.
Our most important memories for the most part are silent ones. Ones that we don’t talk about because of the pain that still resides in them and because they’re almost impossible to share with anyone who has not been there with you.
This week I travelled across to Oban to take the funeral of my wife’s great Aunt who was very dear to us. She was from Lancashire and in the war years she served in an RAF radar station in Norfolk, charting the movements of enemy aircraft. She was full of stories of the camaraderie she found among the folk who worked there, and she stayed good friends with some of them for the rest of her life.
But we know that at one point the young man she loved, and was engaged to, left on a sortie and never came back. She hardly ever spoke about him. It was only in recent days that a little more of that story began to emerge, and only with one or two people.
Some memories are just too painful to revisit.
We keep them stored in a locked room in our mind.
Every now and again we’ll go in and sit in that place in silence for a while, and very occasionally,
if the mood and the company’s right, we might allow someone else to glimpse what’s in there.
But for the most part, those doors stay firmly closed.
And when it comes to this particular Sunday in the year, perhaps it’s right that they do.
Our culture has an almost pornographic obsession with putting everything on display;
but we all know that there are some things that shouldn’t be treated that way because exposure cheapens them. Some things deserve honour and privacy and respect.
We don’t need those who lived through the war as combatants or civilians to share all their innermost memories with us. There are moments when we can read their sorrows in their faces.
But it is important that those who were there, those who fought hard and made it home
feel that all that happened was worthwhile, that it made a difference, and that those who sacrificed so much, are given the honour and respect they deserve.
It is always the way that in times of peace, soldiers and sailors and airmen are undervalued.
But today we remember with gratitude the enormity of the sacrifices that they made in the two world wars so the tyrrany of nations could be ended.
We recognise that cost, and we honour today those who served and those who died,
for us, for our country, and for those who could not fight to save themselves.
War is not a part of God’s plan for this world.
The prophet Isaiah predicts a day when swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and the wolf will lie down in peace with the lamb.
And Christ teaches us to pray for God’s kingdom to come;
and war has no place in that future.
But those days have not yet come.
And as long as our human story is marred by dischord and greed - in other words, by sin -war will be an inevitable part of our landscape.
But we have this promise in the heart of today’s Psalm to hold onto.
God promises that “The wicked will not always rule over the land of the righteous”.
There will be a reckoning, God says, and evil shall not win.
And when we stand up against injustice and oppression,
against violence and tyrrany,
we are firmly within the expressed will of God.
Our prayers today are for the men and women who,
in taking that stand,
gave all that they had to give.
For them, we pray in the words of the Psalmist:
“Lord, do good to those who are good, to those who obey your commands”.
On this Remembrance Sunday, Psalm 125 reminds us that there will be a terrible reckoning for wrongdoing, but lasting reward for those who do the right.
Today we commemorate those who did right, and commit ourselves to follow their example in our day and age.
We will remember them.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
God On Our Side - Psalm 124
“Work fascinates me” – somebody once said. “I can stare at it for hours”.
Psalm 124 has felt like work this week. If my eyes were magnifying glasses I’d have burned a hole in the page with all hours of staring I’ve done at Psalm 124.
And isn’t because I don’t understand it. I understand it just fine.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to preach the kind of exegetical, historical sermon that ministers preach when they run out of real things to say.
But that’s not what you need. And it’s not what I need either.
Sunday by Sunday as we open ourselves up to these ancient texts, what we’re looking for isn’t primarily knowledge. It’s wisdom. Insight that helps us live well and deepen our experience of God.
And like a man wandering round a statue in a museum, I found myself looking prayerfully at Ps 124 from every angle and coming away feeling unmoved and none the wiser. How’s that for a confession! Ministers shouldn’t feel that way, should they?!
And yet, why not? We’re only human. We don’t have a direct line to the Almighty giving us a drip feed of inspiration. Our moods go up and down depending on tiredness, exercise and appetite. We have spells when we feel close to God and times when we wonder if this is all just an exercise in self-delusion. In short, I’m no different from you, just because I happen to be ordained. But I digress.
I looked hard at the Psalm this week and found that nothing moved me. Not a nice feeling when it’s your job to preach on Sunday.
But rather than fall back onto dull historical exegesis for the sake of getting something down on paper, I tried to drag my lack of inspiration into the light and look at it more clearly.
I said - God, why is this Psalm not moving me?
And that’s when things started to get interesting. Ideas began to tumble out like kids getting off a bus at a funfair and racing off in all kinds of directions. And rather than try to corral them all, I managed to round up two or three of the little brats and wipe their noses and smooth down their hair so they could be respectably presented to you this morning.
So here’s the first wee insight I want to offer.
The Psalmist begins with these words: “What if the Lord had not been on our side?”. And I found myself wondering how I would finish that Psalm if it had been me writing it. What if the Lord had not been on my side? I wondered. In all honesty, would I see much difference in the way my life had panned out?
You see Israel had this amazing history. They had been captives in Egypt for over 400 years, and then with signs and wonders God led them out of slavery through Moses. Parting the Red-sea, annihilating their slave masters, providing for them on this arduous journey though the desert that took another 40 years; helping them conquer much more powerful tribes around them so they could finally settle in the promised land.
And with that history, they could look back and say “If God hadn’t been on our side, none of that would have happened! Our enemies would have destroyed us! The waters would have carried us away”.
They had this huge story to tell.
But my story isn’t huge; it’s rather ordinary, to be honest. And I’m pretty sure that’s the same for most of you.
We’ve all read about folk with these remarkable testimonies of where they were before they came to faith and how things have turned around for them: and God bless them.
But most of us haven’t had that kind of a journey.
Put our ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures side by side, and you’d have to look pretty closely to see the difference. Or maybe there is no before or after for you – maybe you’ve always had some level of faith and would struggle to point to a time or place that might be called a conversion.
So given that, how would you finish this Psalm? How would I finish it? What would we have to say? Has God made a difference to our lives? That was my first thought. And I have to say, it made me feel more than a little guilty. I remembered a poster from my student days that said “if you were put on trial for the crime of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”. Makes you think, doesn't it?
But hot on the heels of that, came a second thought which is a little more encouraging.
Most of the people that we read about in the Scriptures seem larger than life. By definition, we end up reading their stories not necessarily because they were remarkable people, but because they had a remarkable role to play in God’s unfolding plans.
Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, Peter, Paul.
Ordinary in one sense, and yet playing an extraordinary part in the story. And that’s why we read about them and try to learn from their experience.
But here’s the thing. For every name in Scripture we know, there are 10,000 names of faithful men and women we never get to hear about. Men and women just going about the ordinary things of their lives with simple trust and faith.
You and I aren’t called to be Moses or Paul or Mary or Ruth and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for that. We’re called to be who God has made us to be, and to love and serve him in the place he’s put us in. If we do that faithfully, he may do wonderful things through us. But that’s his business, not ours.
Israel had this dramatic story to tell. But for ordinary folk like us, all that drama might be hard to relate to. Maybe it’s ok if our stories aren't as gripping, as long as we have something to say when people ask us what difference it makes having God in our lives.
Third thought.
The Psalmist says “What if the Lord had not been on our side”?
What does it look like and feel like, when God is on our side?
That one’s really worth thinking about.
I remember when I first started playing rugby at secondary school. There were a couple of lads in the team who were really big for their age – I mean, 5’6 and 10 stone in first year – big solid farmer’s boys. They were twice the size of most of us!
And when we lined up with them on our side, the opposition were quaking in their boots! All we had to do was get the ball to Booth or Hayburn and they’d do the rest. Those of you who watch rugby will remember the ’95 world Cup when Jonah Lomu ran through the England back line like they were made of straw. It was a bit like that.
You know, a few years later it was a different story. Suddenly everybody had grown a few inches and put on a few pounds. These farmers lads were still good players, but it wasn’t a walk in the park for us any more. We still won more than we lost, but everybody left the field bloodied and bruised.
Having God on your side is much more like the second experience of rugby than the first. No-one comes off the park without a few cuts and bruises.
Sometimes people assume, wrongly, that having God on your side is going to make everything like a walk in the park. Some ministers preach like that, some Christians try to sell the faith to others on that basis.
But they’re just plain wrong.
The Psalmist doesn’t say “The Lord was on our side. Great! Nothing happened to us. We were fine!”
He says “when our enemies attacked us”, “when they got furious with us”, “when the floods came and the waters threatened to cover us”. In other words, bad stuff still came our way. But in the midst of those things, God was on our side.
I know I thump this particular tub on a regular basis, but I keep coming up against this issue pastorally. When troubles come, as they will, folk often take that as a sign of God’s anger, or worse still, his abandonment.
So let me say this once again, loud and clear. Having God on your side doesn’t preserve you from troubles. It preserves you in them.
It’s right there in the Psalm.
“Let us thank the Lord”. Why? Because he kept us from all harm? No – we thank him because he has not let our enemies destroy us.
If you have faith, you won't be destroyed, even when life hands you a beating.
That bereavement you suffered? We’ll you’re still here. And day after day a little more healing takes place.
That illness you’re fighting? You can't stop what it's doing to your body, but you're determined that whatever happens, you’re not going to let it break your spirit.
Those circumstances you’re facing? Your powerless to change them, maybe, but you’ve decided you're not going to let them rule over you.
Why? Because you know that these things don’t have the last word on your life. God has the last word. And you trust him to make it a good word.
And that brings me to the final thing I want to say this morning.
I’ve already mentioned this Psalm looks back to the Exodus, the great formative event in the life of the people of Israel.
But when Christians read about the Exodus, they always see a deeper meaning in those stories, because for us, Moses and his work of liberation was just a foreshadow of Jesus and his work of salvation.
Moses saved Israel from slavery in Egypt. But Jesus’ work saved us eternally from the power of sin and death. His was a second Exodus with eternal consequences.
And in a way, this morning’s Psalm could have been written with Jesus in mind, even though it was penned about a thousand years before his birth.
He took the worst the world could throw at him including abuse, suspicion, betrayal and an agonizing death. Take a snapshot of his life at any one of a score of different times and you could be forgiven for saying “If God’s on his side, why’s that happening?”.
And yet God was on his side; and his resurrection was the final proof of that.
“Let us thank the Lord, who has not let our enemies destroy us.” says the Psalmist
We have escaped like a bird from a hunter’s trap;
the trap is broken and we are free!”.
Those words resonate down through the centuries. Spoken first by the Psalmist, but taken up by Christ as he stands smiling, beside an empty tomb.
The trap is broken and we are free.
That great Exodus story is the backdrop against which the Christian lives out his or her little life. That great story, and its consequences, are the end toward which we are living. The death of death and all that goes with it, and the coming of new life even now.
John Calvin once said that the church is a place of many resurrections. And he was right.
These lives we lead might not seem extraordinary set alongside the story of Israel, or the great heroes of the church. And the truth is, there are times when we find ourselves unmoved, perplexed or even angry as we try to walk with God.
But every act of kindness, every Godward movement, every setting aside of the wrong and embracing of the right is a mini resurrection. A sign of the work God’s begun in us, and as sure as Christ is risen, will one day bring to completion.
That’s the hope Psalm 124 brings us.
Those long hours of head-scratching helped me see that in the end, this Psalm isn’t about us and what we do. It’s about God and what he’s doing.
He’s in the process of saving this world from all that mars it.
And throughout it all, he’s on our side.
Psalm 124 has felt like work this week. If my eyes were magnifying glasses I’d have burned a hole in the page with all hours of staring I’ve done at Psalm 124.
And isn’t because I don’t understand it. I understand it just fine.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to preach the kind of exegetical, historical sermon that ministers preach when they run out of real things to say.
But that’s not what you need. And it’s not what I need either.
Sunday by Sunday as we open ourselves up to these ancient texts, what we’re looking for isn’t primarily knowledge. It’s wisdom. Insight that helps us live well and deepen our experience of God.
And like a man wandering round a statue in a museum, I found myself looking prayerfully at Ps 124 from every angle and coming away feeling unmoved and none the wiser. How’s that for a confession! Ministers shouldn’t feel that way, should they?!
And yet, why not? We’re only human. We don’t have a direct line to the Almighty giving us a drip feed of inspiration. Our moods go up and down depending on tiredness, exercise and appetite. We have spells when we feel close to God and times when we wonder if this is all just an exercise in self-delusion. In short, I’m no different from you, just because I happen to be ordained. But I digress.
I looked hard at the Psalm this week and found that nothing moved me. Not a nice feeling when it’s your job to preach on Sunday.
But rather than fall back onto dull historical exegesis for the sake of getting something down on paper, I tried to drag my lack of inspiration into the light and look at it more clearly.
I said - God, why is this Psalm not moving me?
And that’s when things started to get interesting. Ideas began to tumble out like kids getting off a bus at a funfair and racing off in all kinds of directions. And rather than try to corral them all, I managed to round up two or three of the little brats and wipe their noses and smooth down their hair so they could be respectably presented to you this morning.
So here’s the first wee insight I want to offer.
The Psalmist begins with these words: “What if the Lord had not been on our side?”. And I found myself wondering how I would finish that Psalm if it had been me writing it. What if the Lord had not been on my side? I wondered. In all honesty, would I see much difference in the way my life had panned out?
You see Israel had this amazing history. They had been captives in Egypt for over 400 years, and then with signs and wonders God led them out of slavery through Moses. Parting the Red-sea, annihilating their slave masters, providing for them on this arduous journey though the desert that took another 40 years; helping them conquer much more powerful tribes around them so they could finally settle in the promised land.
And with that history, they could look back and say “If God hadn’t been on our side, none of that would have happened! Our enemies would have destroyed us! The waters would have carried us away”.
They had this huge story to tell.
But my story isn’t huge; it’s rather ordinary, to be honest. And I’m pretty sure that’s the same for most of you.
We’ve all read about folk with these remarkable testimonies of where they were before they came to faith and how things have turned around for them: and God bless them.
But most of us haven’t had that kind of a journey.
Put our ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures side by side, and you’d have to look pretty closely to see the difference. Or maybe there is no before or after for you – maybe you’ve always had some level of faith and would struggle to point to a time or place that might be called a conversion.
So given that, how would you finish this Psalm? How would I finish it? What would we have to say? Has God made a difference to our lives? That was my first thought. And I have to say, it made me feel more than a little guilty. I remembered a poster from my student days that said “if you were put on trial for the crime of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”. Makes you think, doesn't it?
But hot on the heels of that, came a second thought which is a little more encouraging.
Most of the people that we read about in the Scriptures seem larger than life. By definition, we end up reading their stories not necessarily because they were remarkable people, but because they had a remarkable role to play in God’s unfolding plans.
Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, Peter, Paul.
Ordinary in one sense, and yet playing an extraordinary part in the story. And that’s why we read about them and try to learn from their experience.
But here’s the thing. For every name in Scripture we know, there are 10,000 names of faithful men and women we never get to hear about. Men and women just going about the ordinary things of their lives with simple trust and faith.
You and I aren’t called to be Moses or Paul or Mary or Ruth and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for that. We’re called to be who God has made us to be, and to love and serve him in the place he’s put us in. If we do that faithfully, he may do wonderful things through us. But that’s his business, not ours.
Israel had this dramatic story to tell. But for ordinary folk like us, all that drama might be hard to relate to. Maybe it’s ok if our stories aren't as gripping, as long as we have something to say when people ask us what difference it makes having God in our lives.
Third thought.
The Psalmist says “What if the Lord had not been on our side”?
What does it look like and feel like, when God is on our side?
That one’s really worth thinking about.
I remember when I first started playing rugby at secondary school. There were a couple of lads in the team who were really big for their age – I mean, 5’6 and 10 stone in first year – big solid farmer’s boys. They were twice the size of most of us!
And when we lined up with them on our side, the opposition were quaking in their boots! All we had to do was get the ball to Booth or Hayburn and they’d do the rest. Those of you who watch rugby will remember the ’95 world Cup when Jonah Lomu ran through the England back line like they were made of straw. It was a bit like that.
You know, a few years later it was a different story. Suddenly everybody had grown a few inches and put on a few pounds. These farmers lads were still good players, but it wasn’t a walk in the park for us any more. We still won more than we lost, but everybody left the field bloodied and bruised.
Having God on your side is much more like the second experience of rugby than the first. No-one comes off the park without a few cuts and bruises.
Sometimes people assume, wrongly, that having God on your side is going to make everything like a walk in the park. Some ministers preach like that, some Christians try to sell the faith to others on that basis.
But they’re just plain wrong.
The Psalmist doesn’t say “The Lord was on our side. Great! Nothing happened to us. We were fine!”
He says “when our enemies attacked us”, “when they got furious with us”, “when the floods came and the waters threatened to cover us”. In other words, bad stuff still came our way. But in the midst of those things, God was on our side.
I know I thump this particular tub on a regular basis, but I keep coming up against this issue pastorally. When troubles come, as they will, folk often take that as a sign of God’s anger, or worse still, his abandonment.
So let me say this once again, loud and clear. Having God on your side doesn’t preserve you from troubles. It preserves you in them.
It’s right there in the Psalm.
“Let us thank the Lord”. Why? Because he kept us from all harm? No – we thank him because he has not let our enemies destroy us.
If you have faith, you won't be destroyed, even when life hands you a beating.
That bereavement you suffered? We’ll you’re still here. And day after day a little more healing takes place.
That illness you’re fighting? You can't stop what it's doing to your body, but you're determined that whatever happens, you’re not going to let it break your spirit.
Those circumstances you’re facing? Your powerless to change them, maybe, but you’ve decided you're not going to let them rule over you.
Why? Because you know that these things don’t have the last word on your life. God has the last word. And you trust him to make it a good word.
And that brings me to the final thing I want to say this morning.
I’ve already mentioned this Psalm looks back to the Exodus, the great formative event in the life of the people of Israel.
But when Christians read about the Exodus, they always see a deeper meaning in those stories, because for us, Moses and his work of liberation was just a foreshadow of Jesus and his work of salvation.
Moses saved Israel from slavery in Egypt. But Jesus’ work saved us eternally from the power of sin and death. His was a second Exodus with eternal consequences.
And in a way, this morning’s Psalm could have been written with Jesus in mind, even though it was penned about a thousand years before his birth.
He took the worst the world could throw at him including abuse, suspicion, betrayal and an agonizing death. Take a snapshot of his life at any one of a score of different times and you could be forgiven for saying “If God’s on his side, why’s that happening?”.
And yet God was on his side; and his resurrection was the final proof of that.
“Let us thank the Lord, who has not let our enemies destroy us.” says the Psalmist
We have escaped like a bird from a hunter’s trap;
the trap is broken and we are free!”.
Those words resonate down through the centuries. Spoken first by the Psalmist, but taken up by Christ as he stands smiling, beside an empty tomb.
The trap is broken and we are free.
That great Exodus story is the backdrop against which the Christian lives out his or her little life. That great story, and its consequences, are the end toward which we are living. The death of death and all that goes with it, and the coming of new life even now.
John Calvin once said that the church is a place of many resurrections. And he was right.
These lives we lead might not seem extraordinary set alongside the story of Israel, or the great heroes of the church. And the truth is, there are times when we find ourselves unmoved, perplexed or even angry as we try to walk with God.
But every act of kindness, every Godward movement, every setting aside of the wrong and embracing of the right is a mini resurrection. A sign of the work God’s begun in us, and as sure as Christ is risen, will one day bring to completion.
That’s the hope Psalm 124 brings us.
Those long hours of head-scratching helped me see that in the end, this Psalm isn’t about us and what we do. It’s about God and what he’s doing.
He’s in the process of saving this world from all that mars it.
And throughout it all, he’s on our side.
Monday, 26 October 2009
You and Me - Known and Grown (Isaiah 28:23-29)
Well. my friends, you’ve waited a long time for this.
We’re used to hearing that God is like a Father raising his children,
or a shepherd minding his sheep.
We know that in other places
he’s described as a potter working the clay,
or a lover pursuing his beloved.
We’re familiar with him in the roles of King, Judge and Master.
But in today’s reading, God is likened to: a farmer.
Take a moment to bask in the glory, those of you who work the land!
A farmer.
Maybe it’s because, like a farmer, his work’s never done and he gets precious little thanks for it!
More likely it’s because the hard work and organisation and planning that go into farming tell us something important about who God is.
Isaiah the prophet is trying to get a message across to his listeners in the passage we read this morning. Israel had been settled in the promised land for years. Moses and the Exodus were distant history. But in the centuries that followed, the nation had split into two, and a succession of wretched kings had brought them to the brink of destruction.
Babylon had already pillaged most of the country, and what little was left was in danger of being crushed as Egypt and Assyria struggled to become top dog in the Middle East.
The future was unremittingly bleak. Where was God in all of this, the people wondered? Had he washed his hands of them?
“Listen” says the prophet as he walks through the towns and villages.
Look around you. What do you see?
Ordered fields.
Walls and ditches.
Byres and barns.
Gates and fences.
There’s a structure there. A plan. If that's how farmers look after the land, do you think God will be any less structured in his plans for us, and for the world? Do you think he’s going to let it all just go to rack and ruin? No! He’s in control, even though at times it may not seem like it.
I know it feels like we’re being dug up and turned over time and time again, but you need to understand that something good can come out of that pain.
When we get ploughed up and broken, those gashes expose fertile soil where good things can take root and grow if we let them.
This won’t last forever. The ploughing’s never an end in itself. Growth is the end. New life is the end.
The farmer knows that. Only a lunatic would plough endlessly up and down without planting something. The farmer digs what he has to and then he sows. And he works with such respect for the individuality of what’s being sown.! The right kind of seed at the right depth in the right soil given the right care and the right harvesting with the right tools. And in the end, an abundance of different foods for the table.
Do you get the point? If the farmer knows how to plant and harvest all these different kinds of crops, do you think God doesn’t understand the particular circumstances of his people?
Do you think God doesn’t know the detail of your life and mine? Doesn’t understand the challenges each person faces and what each one requires thrive and to grow?
Well you’re wrong! God’s like a farmer. He knows what we are, and he knows what we need.
Sometimes that’s feeding, sometimes it’s pruning, sometimes it’s waiting. But in the end, it all works together for the good.
God knows you, in all your individuality. So trust him.
That’s the main thing Isaiah wanted his people to hear; and it’s good for us to hear it today also.
God knows the things you carry with you every Sunday as you cross the threshold of this church. The worries, the disappointments, the doubts, the failures, the hopes. He knows. He knows before you open your mouth or send a thought in his direction.
You can’t spring something on God… he knows!
And there are two ways we can go with that. We can spend our days trying to hide from him – which is exactly what humanity’s been doing since Adam and Eve first sported fig leaves. Some hide outside the church; others hide inside the church. The location doesn’t matter. Hiding is hiding.
But faced with God’s complete knowledge of them, there are others who raise their hands and say – “God – for better or for worse, this is who I am. Can you find it within yourself to love me anyway?”. To which God always answers “Sure I can. Sure I can.”
And that’s when growth in the way of Christ begins; that’s when the seed enters the soil.
Faith begins when we stop trying to commend ourselves to God and realise that because of what Christ did on the cross, God’s first word to us is not one of condemnation, but acceptance. Can you love me? Sure I can.
Sure you need to change; we all do. But that’s work God will do in you because he loves you; not work you have to do to earn his love. Grace comes first and change will follow.
The farmer knows his seeds. He knows which are blight resistant; the strains that are awkward to grow; the plants that are high-maintenance and those that more-or-less see to themselves. And he loves them all, and persists with them all because in the end he wants them to be fruitful. That’s why he’s a farmer.
Well, God’s like a farmer, says Isaiah: He knows what’s locked away within you, waiting to get out. He knows what you need to grow to your full potential. And he loves looking out over the field he calls his church, and seeing the marvellous variety of people who are rooted there and bearing fruit in their own particular way.
We’re used to hearing that God is like a Father raising his children,
or a shepherd minding his sheep.
We know that in other places
he’s described as a potter working the clay,
or a lover pursuing his beloved.
We’re familiar with him in the roles of King, Judge and Master.
But in today’s reading, God is likened to: a farmer.
Take a moment to bask in the glory, those of you who work the land!
A farmer.
Maybe it’s because, like a farmer, his work’s never done and he gets precious little thanks for it!
More likely it’s because the hard work and organisation and planning that go into farming tell us something important about who God is.
Isaiah the prophet is trying to get a message across to his listeners in the passage we read this morning. Israel had been settled in the promised land for years. Moses and the Exodus were distant history. But in the centuries that followed, the nation had split into two, and a succession of wretched kings had brought them to the brink of destruction.
Babylon had already pillaged most of the country, and what little was left was in danger of being crushed as Egypt and Assyria struggled to become top dog in the Middle East.
The future was unremittingly bleak. Where was God in all of this, the people wondered? Had he washed his hands of them?
“Listen” says the prophet as he walks through the towns and villages.
Look around you. What do you see?
Ordered fields.
Walls and ditches.
Byres and barns.
Gates and fences.
There’s a structure there. A plan. If that's how farmers look after the land, do you think God will be any less structured in his plans for us, and for the world? Do you think he’s going to let it all just go to rack and ruin? No! He’s in control, even though at times it may not seem like it.
I know it feels like we’re being dug up and turned over time and time again, but you need to understand that something good can come out of that pain.
When we get ploughed up and broken, those gashes expose fertile soil where good things can take root and grow if we let them.
This won’t last forever. The ploughing’s never an end in itself. Growth is the end. New life is the end.
The farmer knows that. Only a lunatic would plough endlessly up and down without planting something. The farmer digs what he has to and then he sows. And he works with such respect for the individuality of what’s being sown.! The right kind of seed at the right depth in the right soil given the right care and the right harvesting with the right tools. And in the end, an abundance of different foods for the table.
Do you get the point? If the farmer knows how to plant and harvest all these different kinds of crops, do you think God doesn’t understand the particular circumstances of his people?
Do you think God doesn’t know the detail of your life and mine? Doesn’t understand the challenges each person faces and what each one requires thrive and to grow?
Well you’re wrong! God’s like a farmer. He knows what we are, and he knows what we need.
Sometimes that’s feeding, sometimes it’s pruning, sometimes it’s waiting. But in the end, it all works together for the good.
God knows you, in all your individuality. So trust him.
That’s the main thing Isaiah wanted his people to hear; and it’s good for us to hear it today also.
God knows the things you carry with you every Sunday as you cross the threshold of this church. The worries, the disappointments, the doubts, the failures, the hopes. He knows. He knows before you open your mouth or send a thought in his direction.
You can’t spring something on God… he knows!
And there are two ways we can go with that. We can spend our days trying to hide from him – which is exactly what humanity’s been doing since Adam and Eve first sported fig leaves. Some hide outside the church; others hide inside the church. The location doesn’t matter. Hiding is hiding.
But faced with God’s complete knowledge of them, there are others who raise their hands and say – “God – for better or for worse, this is who I am. Can you find it within yourself to love me anyway?”. To which God always answers “Sure I can. Sure I can.”
And that’s when growth in the way of Christ begins; that’s when the seed enters the soil.
Faith begins when we stop trying to commend ourselves to God and realise that because of what Christ did on the cross, God’s first word to us is not one of condemnation, but acceptance. Can you love me? Sure I can.
Sure you need to change; we all do. But that’s work God will do in you because he loves you; not work you have to do to earn his love. Grace comes first and change will follow.
The farmer knows his seeds. He knows which are blight resistant; the strains that are awkward to grow; the plants that are high-maintenance and those that more-or-less see to themselves. And he loves them all, and persists with them all because in the end he wants them to be fruitful. That’s why he’s a farmer.
Well, God’s like a farmer, says Isaiah: He knows what’s locked away within you, waiting to get out. He knows what you need to grow to your full potential. And he loves looking out over the field he calls his church, and seeing the marvellous variety of people who are rooted there and bearing fruit in their own particular way.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
Joy and Worship - Strange Bedfellows? Psalm 122
“I rejoiced with those who said to me “Let us go to the house of the Lord”.
I know what I’m supposed to say this morning.
But I’m not going to say it.
The Biblical commentaries are all bullying me into saying it. The authors I’ve read on Psalm 122 want me to say it. Even my own conscience is prodding me towards saying it.
But I’m not going to.
Here’s what I’m not going to say.
“Do you hear the Psalmist? He rejoiced at the prospect of going up to worship. Do you rejoice when you roll out of bed on a Sunday morning and think about going to church? Well you should do! That should be your first thought! Shame on you for not rejoicing!”
It’d be so easy to lay on the guilt this morning, because I’m not sure many of us are here out of sheer joy at the prospect of coming to church. And all a haranguing from the pulpit would achieve would be to send us all away making a mental note to schedule in some more joy. To work harder at being joyful. Which is, of course, a nonsense.
I know a few folk who try too hard to be joyful, and you know what? They’re pretty exhausting people to be around. And not the most genuine either.
There’s a U2 song which says – “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at – like smiling, crying and celebrity”. And the boys from Dublin have a point. The truth is, if you smile too much, people will stop believing that the smiles are real.
And what’s true of the individual is true of churches as well. Maybe you’ve been to the kind of church where there’s a definite agenda to whip up emotion, particularly through the style of music and the worship songs that are used.
Now there’s nothing wrong with emotion in our singing. Quite the opposite. The problem is when there’s only one flavour of emotion on offer. It’s all triumph, all victory, all glory; and yet who among us lives like that all the time?
The author Brian McLaren deals with that issue in an article called “An open letter to Worship Songwriters”. He writes:
Is it too much to ask that we be more honest? Since doubt is part of our lives, since pain and waiting and as-yet unresolved disappointment are part of our lives, can’t these things be reflected in the songs of our communities? Doesn’t endless singing about celebration lose its vitality (and even its credibility) if we don’t also sing about the struggle?
McLaren and others point us back to the Psalms for inspiration, because there you find the whole spectrum of human emotions on display. The writers of the Psalms know what it is to grieve and mourn and celebrate and rejoice and be angry. They know that the human song isn’t sung in one emotional key.
And that’s why I’m not going to get on anybody’s case this morning if you haven’t come to worship frothing over with joy. These things ebb and flow. We can’t live at fever pitch all the time. All that matters is that you’ve come, and that you keep coming in the good times and in the bad.
But what I do want us to do for a moment is pause and think about what the Psalmist says, and what we might learn from him.
“I rejoiced with those who said to me “Let us go to the house of the Lord”.
It’s that word rejoice that really caught my attention this week.
What makes you rejoice in life? What makes your heart lift?
That’s not a question you should rush to answer. You need to chew it over for a while.
But for what it’s worth, let me offer these as a starter –
Christmas; birthdays; holidays.
Meaningful work; hard-earned rest.
Simple pleasures like good food, music, conversation and taking exercise.
Agreement; seeing people learn and grow; loving someone; knowing you’re loved in return.
One of the delights of my life is when my 3-year-old comes home from somewhere with her mummy, pushes open the door of my study and runs into my arms with a smile that lights up her whole face, and probably a good proportion of the parish. There’s no better medicine in God’s good earth than unconditional love.
And no surer way to cultivate joy than resting in God’s unconditional love. Quiet time in company with God is one of the joys of my life.
That’s stuff we can relate to, isn’t it? We know that’s the stuff of joy,
And here’s the thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for the Psalmist, this whole business of going up to Jerusalem to worship was more than just going up to a particular building to say a prayer and sing some songs.
We read: “Let us go to the house of the Lord” and we interpret that as “let us go to church”. We translate his words straight into our experience without really understanding his experience. We imagine him popping into the local C of S for his weekly hymn-prayer sandwich
But the experience of this ascent, this trip to Jerusalem, was so much richer than we understand.
These festivals lasted for a week or more. It was a spell of enforced rest. Nobody was allowed to work. Suddenly the whole community had leisure time. There were feasts to enjoy. Friends to catch up with. Stories to tell.
People had time to talk about things that really mattered. Problems were shared; hopes brought out into the light as friends talked into the wee small hours over food and wine. And God was at the centre of it all! God had commanded it!
This was the community gathering for worship. Not doing religious things, though there was a time for that; but doing ordinary things. Things that brought joy.
And when the time came for the temple rituals, that time they’d shared together made the religious rites more meaningful because each person participated not just as an individual, but as part of the worshipping community, Part of this Israel to which they belonged.
They would have had a profound sense, not just of belonging to God, but belonging to a people.
Is it too much to suggest that that goes some way to explaining why the Psalmist responded with joy when his friends said “Let’s go to the house of the Lord?” For him it wasn’t just a duty or a habit. It was a God-given chance to have a real encounter with other people and with God himself, as the community gathered for worship.
There’s a strange line in the Psalm in verse 3 that doesn’t seem to fit. “Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together”. But many of the commentators see in that a reference to this togetherness among the people. They huddled up. For one week at a time, three times a year, life in Jerusalem mirrored the architecture in Jerusalem as the people of God lived and worshipped close enough to one another to make a difference.
You know, I’m convicted by the richness of that experience this morning.
Maybe part of the reason we find it hard to identity with the ‘joy’ the Psalmist speaks of is because we’ve lost something of the kind of worship he knew, which was communal, social, meaningful and real.
We live in the age of the individual. The autonomous self is king or queen. And by and large, the church has bought into that culture.
Many come to the hour of worship like passengers stepping onto a train; trying to get to the destination they want with as little bother from the other passengers as possible. Our church architecture positively encourages that – we sit in serried ranks, facing forward which allows us to avoid the messy business of having to engage with anyone else; we get what we came for, and we take ourselves off home again.
Where’s the community in that? Where’s the joy in that?
Is it any wonder, if that’s all our churches are offering, that by and large the younger generation have voted with their feet?
Let me tell you what this next generation are looking for from church:
This is a short extract from a book called Velvet Elvis by a guy called Rob Bell who’s the pastor of Mars Hill church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
My wife and I and several others started this church called Mars Hill in February of 1999 with dreams of what a revolutionary new kind of community could be.
I was twenty eight.
What do you know about anything when you’re twenty eight?
But anyway – we did it. We started a church.
The dream actually began years before when Kristen and I were living in Los Angeles. We heard about a church called Christian Assembly, so we visited it. What I saw changed everything for me. It was like nothing I had experienced before. This community was exploding with creativity and life – it was like people woke up on Sunday and asked themselves, “What would I like to do today more than anything else? How about going to a church service?”
I could not get my mind around this at first.
This concept was so new and fresh – people who gathered because they wanted to.
There wasn’t a trace of empty ritual or obligation anywhere in the place.
Not “I have to” but “I want to”
Not obligation but celebration
Not duty, but desire.
Kristen and I started attending these services regularly, and then we’d go to the McDonalds on Colorado Boulevard and talk about what a church could be.
Desire
Longing
Come as you are
Connection
A group of people who can imagine nothing better than this.
and so, several years, two internships and a cross-country move later, we did it. We started a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Within 6 months, there were 4000 people gathering for worship. And within two years, there were 10,000 meeting in a renovated mall for three worship services on a Sunday.
It’s an amazing story, and to be honest, it could probably only happen in America.
But I tell it only to highlight that this generation might not be as switched off to God as we think. Maybe they’re just switched off to the way we’ve been doing church.
If the way we’ve been doing church doesn’t take us deeper into God, and deeper into relationship with one another – as this upcoming generation desires - then maybe it’s time to find better ways of doing church. Ways that bring us more joy.
Here in Belhelvie, I think we’re beginning to scratch the surface of that, though there’s a long way to go. So please remember to pray for our church and its leaders. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, says the Psalmist. Pray for the thriving and the prosperity of God’s church.
“I rejoiced with those who said to me “Let us go to the house of the Lord” said the Psalmist.
What do we need to do here to make people rejoice, I wonder? To make people see that God’s house is a good place to be?
Here are some voices to take with you as we end this time together:
I rejoiced when you invited me back to your home for a meal, even though I was a stranger to you.
I rejoiced when you left your friends to come and speak with me at coffee, even though you didn’t know me.
I rejoiced when you said ‘we haven’t seen you for a few weeks. You've been missed. Have you been keeping ok?’
I rejoiced when you said ‘You seem really tired. Do you want me to come and watch the children for a few hours’?
I rejoiced when you said ‘I’ve had a great idea for something our church could do for our community’
I rejoiced when you said ‘I’ll do it’ without being asked to.
I rejoiced when you didn’t just ask for me, but came to see me when I needed someone close by.
Lord, help us to become that kind of community, and recover that kind of worship, we pray
Not “I have to” but “I want to”
Not obligation but celebration
Not duty, but desire,
and throughout it all - joy.
I know what I’m supposed to say this morning.
But I’m not going to say it.
The Biblical commentaries are all bullying me into saying it. The authors I’ve read on Psalm 122 want me to say it. Even my own conscience is prodding me towards saying it.
But I’m not going to.
Here’s what I’m not going to say.
“Do you hear the Psalmist? He rejoiced at the prospect of going up to worship. Do you rejoice when you roll out of bed on a Sunday morning and think about going to church? Well you should do! That should be your first thought! Shame on you for not rejoicing!”
It’d be so easy to lay on the guilt this morning, because I’m not sure many of us are here out of sheer joy at the prospect of coming to church. And all a haranguing from the pulpit would achieve would be to send us all away making a mental note to schedule in some more joy. To work harder at being joyful. Which is, of course, a nonsense.
I know a few folk who try too hard to be joyful, and you know what? They’re pretty exhausting people to be around. And not the most genuine either.
There’s a U2 song which says – “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at – like smiling, crying and celebrity”. And the boys from Dublin have a point. The truth is, if you smile too much, people will stop believing that the smiles are real.
And what’s true of the individual is true of churches as well. Maybe you’ve been to the kind of church where there’s a definite agenda to whip up emotion, particularly through the style of music and the worship songs that are used.
Now there’s nothing wrong with emotion in our singing. Quite the opposite. The problem is when there’s only one flavour of emotion on offer. It’s all triumph, all victory, all glory; and yet who among us lives like that all the time?
The author Brian McLaren deals with that issue in an article called “An open letter to Worship Songwriters”. He writes:
Is it too much to ask that we be more honest? Since doubt is part of our lives, since pain and waiting and as-yet unresolved disappointment are part of our lives, can’t these things be reflected in the songs of our communities? Doesn’t endless singing about celebration lose its vitality (and even its credibility) if we don’t also sing about the struggle?
McLaren and others point us back to the Psalms for inspiration, because there you find the whole spectrum of human emotions on display. The writers of the Psalms know what it is to grieve and mourn and celebrate and rejoice and be angry. They know that the human song isn’t sung in one emotional key.
And that’s why I’m not going to get on anybody’s case this morning if you haven’t come to worship frothing over with joy. These things ebb and flow. We can’t live at fever pitch all the time. All that matters is that you’ve come, and that you keep coming in the good times and in the bad.
But what I do want us to do for a moment is pause and think about what the Psalmist says, and what we might learn from him.
“I rejoiced with those who said to me “Let us go to the house of the Lord”.
It’s that word rejoice that really caught my attention this week.
What makes you rejoice in life? What makes your heart lift?
That’s not a question you should rush to answer. You need to chew it over for a while.
But for what it’s worth, let me offer these as a starter –
Christmas; birthdays; holidays.
Meaningful work; hard-earned rest.
Simple pleasures like good food, music, conversation and taking exercise.
Agreement; seeing people learn and grow; loving someone; knowing you’re loved in return.
One of the delights of my life is when my 3-year-old comes home from somewhere with her mummy, pushes open the door of my study and runs into my arms with a smile that lights up her whole face, and probably a good proportion of the parish. There’s no better medicine in God’s good earth than unconditional love.
And no surer way to cultivate joy than resting in God’s unconditional love. Quiet time in company with God is one of the joys of my life.
That’s stuff we can relate to, isn’t it? We know that’s the stuff of joy,
And here’s the thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for the Psalmist, this whole business of going up to Jerusalem to worship was more than just going up to a particular building to say a prayer and sing some songs.
We read: “Let us go to the house of the Lord” and we interpret that as “let us go to church”. We translate his words straight into our experience without really understanding his experience. We imagine him popping into the local C of S for his weekly hymn-prayer sandwich
But the experience of this ascent, this trip to Jerusalem, was so much richer than we understand.
These festivals lasted for a week or more. It was a spell of enforced rest. Nobody was allowed to work. Suddenly the whole community had leisure time. There were feasts to enjoy. Friends to catch up with. Stories to tell.
People had time to talk about things that really mattered. Problems were shared; hopes brought out into the light as friends talked into the wee small hours over food and wine. And God was at the centre of it all! God had commanded it!
This was the community gathering for worship. Not doing religious things, though there was a time for that; but doing ordinary things. Things that brought joy.
And when the time came for the temple rituals, that time they’d shared together made the religious rites more meaningful because each person participated not just as an individual, but as part of the worshipping community, Part of this Israel to which they belonged.
They would have had a profound sense, not just of belonging to God, but belonging to a people.
Is it too much to suggest that that goes some way to explaining why the Psalmist responded with joy when his friends said “Let’s go to the house of the Lord?” For him it wasn’t just a duty or a habit. It was a God-given chance to have a real encounter with other people and with God himself, as the community gathered for worship.
There’s a strange line in the Psalm in verse 3 that doesn’t seem to fit. “Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together”. But many of the commentators see in that a reference to this togetherness among the people. They huddled up. For one week at a time, three times a year, life in Jerusalem mirrored the architecture in Jerusalem as the people of God lived and worshipped close enough to one another to make a difference.
You know, I’m convicted by the richness of that experience this morning.
Maybe part of the reason we find it hard to identity with the ‘joy’ the Psalmist speaks of is because we’ve lost something of the kind of worship he knew, which was communal, social, meaningful and real.
We live in the age of the individual. The autonomous self is king or queen. And by and large, the church has bought into that culture.
Many come to the hour of worship like passengers stepping onto a train; trying to get to the destination they want with as little bother from the other passengers as possible. Our church architecture positively encourages that – we sit in serried ranks, facing forward which allows us to avoid the messy business of having to engage with anyone else; we get what we came for, and we take ourselves off home again.
Where’s the community in that? Where’s the joy in that?
Is it any wonder, if that’s all our churches are offering, that by and large the younger generation have voted with their feet?
Let me tell you what this next generation are looking for from church:
This is a short extract from a book called Velvet Elvis by a guy called Rob Bell who’s the pastor of Mars Hill church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
My wife and I and several others started this church called Mars Hill in February of 1999 with dreams of what a revolutionary new kind of community could be.
I was twenty eight.
What do you know about anything when you’re twenty eight?
But anyway – we did it. We started a church.
The dream actually began years before when Kristen and I were living in Los Angeles. We heard about a church called Christian Assembly, so we visited it. What I saw changed everything for me. It was like nothing I had experienced before. This community was exploding with creativity and life – it was like people woke up on Sunday and asked themselves, “What would I like to do today more than anything else? How about going to a church service?”
I could not get my mind around this at first.
This concept was so new and fresh – people who gathered because they wanted to.
There wasn’t a trace of empty ritual or obligation anywhere in the place.
Not “I have to” but “I want to”
Not obligation but celebration
Not duty, but desire.
Kristen and I started attending these services regularly, and then we’d go to the McDonalds on Colorado Boulevard and talk about what a church could be.
Desire
Longing
Come as you are
Connection
A group of people who can imagine nothing better than this.
and so, several years, two internships and a cross-country move later, we did it. We started a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Within 6 months, there were 4000 people gathering for worship. And within two years, there were 10,000 meeting in a renovated mall for three worship services on a Sunday.
It’s an amazing story, and to be honest, it could probably only happen in America.
But I tell it only to highlight that this generation might not be as switched off to God as we think. Maybe they’re just switched off to the way we’ve been doing church.
If the way we’ve been doing church doesn’t take us deeper into God, and deeper into relationship with one another – as this upcoming generation desires - then maybe it’s time to find better ways of doing church. Ways that bring us more joy.
Here in Belhelvie, I think we’re beginning to scratch the surface of that, though there’s a long way to go. So please remember to pray for our church and its leaders. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, says the Psalmist. Pray for the thriving and the prosperity of God’s church.
“I rejoiced with those who said to me “Let us go to the house of the Lord” said the Psalmist.
What do we need to do here to make people rejoice, I wonder? To make people see that God’s house is a good place to be?
Here are some voices to take with you as we end this time together:
I rejoiced when you invited me back to your home for a meal, even though I was a stranger to you.
I rejoiced when you left your friends to come and speak with me at coffee, even though you didn’t know me.
I rejoiced when you said ‘we haven’t seen you for a few weeks. You've been missed. Have you been keeping ok?’
I rejoiced when you said ‘You seem really tired. Do you want me to come and watch the children for a few hours’?
I rejoiced when you said ‘I’ve had a great idea for something our church could do for our community’
I rejoiced when you said ‘I’ll do it’ without being asked to.
I rejoiced when you didn’t just ask for me, but came to see me when I needed someone close by.
Lord, help us to become that kind of community, and recover that kind of worship, we pray
Not “I have to” but “I want to”
Not obligation but celebration
Not duty, but desire,
and throughout it all - joy.
The Edinburgh Train and the Thousand Yard Stare - Psalm 121
“I lift my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from?”
Those words took on new meaning for me a few weeks ago on a train journey down to Edinburgh.
Once every couple of months I get up with the larks, the farmers and the poor souls who work in Altens and catch the red eye train from Dyce to Edinburgh for a committee meeting that starts at half past ten.
And I have to confess, I quite enjoy those wee trips. It gets me out of the parish for a while, and a change is as good as a rest; but more than that, as a father of three kids under 9, those three uninterrupted hours are precious, always assuming I manage to stay awake to enjoy them.
But if I do, they’re great – sometimes I listen to sermons on my MP3 player – I know that’s sad, but it’d be even sadder if they were my own sermons! Sometimes I read, sometimes I catch up on the paperwork I’m supposed to have digested before arriving at 121 George Street.
So the time goes quickly. But on the last journey, I found myself looking around a bit more than usual. Slipping into observational mode. And these are some of the thoughts I scribbled down on my A4 pad somewhere between Dundee and Edinburgh. Try and imagine the scenes in your mind’s eye.
I lift my eyes as the silence is broken by the loud, unselfconscious chatter of a gaggle of young women struggling onto the train in skimpy tops and cropped denim.
Geared up for sunshine, they haul their leopardskin suitcases onto the carriage and fill grey commuterdom with gaudy, neon energy. We can’t help looking. Their anti-gravity pulls us in.
Commuterdom frowns at this intrusion. They don’t belong. A thin executive sitting nearby grabs his jacket and laptop and seeks solace further down the carriage. Knowing looks are exchanged from beneath peroxide fringes.
From the depths of a handbag an i-Pod dock is extracted and fired up. The sacrament of music. The world must see their light; hear the soundtrack of their lives. They are disco-balls at a funeral, spinning carefree to Ibiza hardcore as the confused mourners try not to stare.
“Hen night” I think, but the man with the food trolley guesses correctly. “Off on holiday?” he asks. “Aye – we’re off to Spain”. “Where in Spain? Spain’s a big place” he counters with practiced ease. He’s seen this so many times before – knows how to deal with these round pegs in square holes.
And so they chat, they laugh, they text for a while. But after an hour, even they surrender to the unspoken codes by which we travel. They quieten down. And I notice one of them, dark haired, peering through the window in a thousand yard stare. For a moment her guard slips and I see that she’s pensive. Wondering what lies ahead. How this adventure will turn out. What there is to look forward to beyond these sun-soaked few days.
The woman in the blue suit got on at Dundee. She cuts a fine figure – tanned and fit and wearing her years well. She sits opposite me and within moments she’s deep in her paperwork.
She has the air of a businesswoman, wearing preoccupation like a strong perfume: a little overpowering.
A lawyer, maybe? An executive? Attending a meeting or giving a talk, perhaps? She looks like the kind who can manage things; can take the hard decisions.
Her face is a mask, though I can only glance at her occasionally when she’s diverted by her reading. There’s a hardness there that sits uneasily with the feminine pastel blue of her jacket.
But there are times in the journey when the papers are set aside, and as she watches the trees and houses race past I know it’s not work she’s thinking of because her face softens and relaxes. She unclenches from the inside. Somewhere far beyond the fields and hedgerows, the transactions and power-lunches, are the answers she’s looking for in life.
Across the aisle a young man in his late teens or early twenties sits alone at a table, spreading himself wide to commandeer the space. The tell-tale white earphone cords convey music to his brain and a clear message to the rest of us. “I want to be left alone”.
He’s restless – white trainers tapping, eyes flickering over the passengers’ faces as they move through the carriage, and checking his mobile every couple of minutes. but always they return to the window: even though nothing beyond the glass holds his attention for long.
His eyes tell a story. What’s he running from? What’s he looking for? What’s it going to take to bring him peace?
“I lift my eyes to the hills” says the Psalmist. “Where does my help come from?”.
He’s captured something there, hasn’t he? It’s a moment I think we all recognise.
He’s describing those times when you find yourself lifting your eyes off the mundane tasks that fall to you every day, and gazing out in your minds eye to what may or may not lie ahead.
For the Psalmist the mundane task was putting one foot in front of another on the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem. What lay ahead were the mountains that barred his way.
It could be that he dreaded the hard climb that lay before him.
It might be that was he looking forward to it……
We don’t know.
All we know is that for a moment he lifted his eyes off the beaten track and allowed himself to contemplate what was ahead. And something honest happened in him. Something true. He saw the way ahead, and he knew he needed help to go on.
And for good or for ill, we know those moments too.
If it were you pausing on that track on the way to Jerusalem, or more likely gazing out the window of the Edinburgh train, I wonder what you’d be saying to yourself in those moments?
As you contemplate your life and your relationships and your future, what would you be saying?
“I wish I knew where all of this is going.”
“I want to be in a better place than I am just now.”
“I don’t think I can make this on my own”.
“I don’t have the energy for this any more”
“I want to make the most of everything I’ve been given”.
Isn’t all of that, to a greater or lesser degree, a plea for help?
It is for the Psalmist.
“I lift my eyes to the hills” he says
And seeing those hills – the challenges and opportunities that lie on his horizon – he asks himself “Where’s my help? Where does my help come from?”
And he himself supplies the answer.– “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth”. The God who made all things. Who made me. Who knows me, and this path in life that I have to follow.
I might not know where all this is going, but God knows.
I might not think I can make it on my own, but I’m not on my own.
I might not have the energy for this journey, but he can empower me through his Spirit.
Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord the maker of heaven and earth.
But what does that help look like?
Well here we have to be careful as we read on in the Psalm, because if we took things literally we’d be in trouble.
If the Psalmist really meant that God wouldn’t let our foot slip, or let the sun hurt us by day or the moon by night then we could all climb Ben Nevis in wintertime wearing khaki shorts and sandshoes and be perfectly safe!
And that’s not what’s being said. We know that faith isn’t a talisman that protects us from harm.
But there are a couple of promises to hold onto here.
Firstly – God is alert to our needs. All our needs.
Did you notice how many times the Psalmist speaks about God being awake and alert?
v3 – Your protector is always awake.
v4 – the protector of Israel never slumbers or sleeps.
v5 – the Lord will guard you
v7 – the Lord will protect you; he will keep you safe.
The pagan gods of the day were too human by far. The followers of the idol Baal thought they had to waken him up by shouting and cutting themselves in their religious rituals.
But Israel’s God was always near; always concerned; always watching.
Not just in the big things, but in the small things, because they mattered too.
So God is alert to our needs. But secondly, what about this promise of protection? This is where we feel a tension.
What do all these promises mean if we’re not to take them literally?
What good is a promise to keep us safe from harm, when we know that harm comes to people we love, and people who love God, all the time?
Well I guess my answer to that is to ask a question. It’s an annoying habit, I know, but I learned it from Jesus, so that makes it ok!
What is God promising to keep safe in this Psalm? Is it our bodies? Because if so, it’s a pretty empty promise. Christians get sick. They break legs. They fall off mountains. We know that.
No – I think there’s another way to understand this.
What God’s promising to protect is our future with him. The wellbeing of our souls, both now and forever, as it says in verse 8.
Any responsible reading of the lives of any of the key characters in Scripture shows that they all faced trouble and hardship. But in keeping their eyes on God throughout that trouble, they kept their faith. Doubt didn’t destroy it. Crises didn’t corrode it.
Elsewhere in the Bible, following God is described like being on a path. Jesus’ first disciples were called ‘followers of the Way”. God’s saying “Stick with me and I won’t let you slip off the path.”
The real challenges that face you – the sun by day – and the worries that haunt your dreams – the moon by night – will not harm you if you remember that I am by your side. I will protect you. I will keep you safe.
Is that making more sense? I hope so, because that seems to chime with a whole lot of other stuff that we find in Scripture.
In an age when the church was being cruelly persecuted, the apostle Paul wrote these words to the church in Rome, which would have met within walking distance of the bloodied sands of the Coliseum.
What can separate us from the love of Christ?
Can affliction or hardship?
Can persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger or sword?
I am convinced that there is nothing in death or life,
In the realm of spirits or spiritual powers,
in the world as it is or the world as it shall be,
in the forces of the universe,
in heights or depths - nothing in all creation
that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Whatever befalls, nothing can separate us from God, in life or in death.
Nowhere in Scripture are we promised an escape from trouble, and Psalm 121 is no exception. But what we are promised, again and again, is that God is with us in our struggles and they will not have the last word on our lives unless we let them.
As somebody once observed, a ship can stay afloat in almost every storm, as long as the water doesn’t get inside.
So the next time you find yourself gazing out of a train window, or into the embers of a fire, or through the TV screen; when you find yourself lifting your eyes to the hills and wondering what on earth lies ahead, try looking a little further and a little higher. Because beyond the hills is the maker of heaven and earth, and a future, in him, that’s secure.
Those words took on new meaning for me a few weeks ago on a train journey down to Edinburgh.
Once every couple of months I get up with the larks, the farmers and the poor souls who work in Altens and catch the red eye train from Dyce to Edinburgh for a committee meeting that starts at half past ten.
And I have to confess, I quite enjoy those wee trips. It gets me out of the parish for a while, and a change is as good as a rest; but more than that, as a father of three kids under 9, those three uninterrupted hours are precious, always assuming I manage to stay awake to enjoy them.
But if I do, they’re great – sometimes I listen to sermons on my MP3 player – I know that’s sad, but it’d be even sadder if they were my own sermons! Sometimes I read, sometimes I catch up on the paperwork I’m supposed to have digested before arriving at 121 George Street.
So the time goes quickly. But on the last journey, I found myself looking around a bit more than usual. Slipping into observational mode. And these are some of the thoughts I scribbled down on my A4 pad somewhere between Dundee and Edinburgh. Try and imagine the scenes in your mind’s eye.
I lift my eyes as the silence is broken by the loud, unselfconscious chatter of a gaggle of young women struggling onto the train in skimpy tops and cropped denim.
Geared up for sunshine, they haul their leopardskin suitcases onto the carriage and fill grey commuterdom with gaudy, neon energy. We can’t help looking. Their anti-gravity pulls us in.
Commuterdom frowns at this intrusion. They don’t belong. A thin executive sitting nearby grabs his jacket and laptop and seeks solace further down the carriage. Knowing looks are exchanged from beneath peroxide fringes.
From the depths of a handbag an i-Pod dock is extracted and fired up. The sacrament of music. The world must see their light; hear the soundtrack of their lives. They are disco-balls at a funeral, spinning carefree to Ibiza hardcore as the confused mourners try not to stare.
“Hen night” I think, but the man with the food trolley guesses correctly. “Off on holiday?” he asks. “Aye – we’re off to Spain”. “Where in Spain? Spain’s a big place” he counters with practiced ease. He’s seen this so many times before – knows how to deal with these round pegs in square holes.
And so they chat, they laugh, they text for a while. But after an hour, even they surrender to the unspoken codes by which we travel. They quieten down. And I notice one of them, dark haired, peering through the window in a thousand yard stare. For a moment her guard slips and I see that she’s pensive. Wondering what lies ahead. How this adventure will turn out. What there is to look forward to beyond these sun-soaked few days.
The woman in the blue suit got on at Dundee. She cuts a fine figure – tanned and fit and wearing her years well. She sits opposite me and within moments she’s deep in her paperwork.
She has the air of a businesswoman, wearing preoccupation like a strong perfume: a little overpowering.
A lawyer, maybe? An executive? Attending a meeting or giving a talk, perhaps? She looks like the kind who can manage things; can take the hard decisions.
Her face is a mask, though I can only glance at her occasionally when she’s diverted by her reading. There’s a hardness there that sits uneasily with the feminine pastel blue of her jacket.
But there are times in the journey when the papers are set aside, and as she watches the trees and houses race past I know it’s not work she’s thinking of because her face softens and relaxes. She unclenches from the inside. Somewhere far beyond the fields and hedgerows, the transactions and power-lunches, are the answers she’s looking for in life.
Across the aisle a young man in his late teens or early twenties sits alone at a table, spreading himself wide to commandeer the space. The tell-tale white earphone cords convey music to his brain and a clear message to the rest of us. “I want to be left alone”.
He’s restless – white trainers tapping, eyes flickering over the passengers’ faces as they move through the carriage, and checking his mobile every couple of minutes. but always they return to the window: even though nothing beyond the glass holds his attention for long.
His eyes tell a story. What’s he running from? What’s he looking for? What’s it going to take to bring him peace?
“I lift my eyes to the hills” says the Psalmist. “Where does my help come from?”.
He’s captured something there, hasn’t he? It’s a moment I think we all recognise.
He’s describing those times when you find yourself lifting your eyes off the mundane tasks that fall to you every day, and gazing out in your minds eye to what may or may not lie ahead.
For the Psalmist the mundane task was putting one foot in front of another on the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem. What lay ahead were the mountains that barred his way.
It could be that he dreaded the hard climb that lay before him.
It might be that was he looking forward to it……
We don’t know.
All we know is that for a moment he lifted his eyes off the beaten track and allowed himself to contemplate what was ahead. And something honest happened in him. Something true. He saw the way ahead, and he knew he needed help to go on.
And for good or for ill, we know those moments too.
If it were you pausing on that track on the way to Jerusalem, or more likely gazing out the window of the Edinburgh train, I wonder what you’d be saying to yourself in those moments?
As you contemplate your life and your relationships and your future, what would you be saying?
“I wish I knew where all of this is going.”
“I want to be in a better place than I am just now.”
“I don’t think I can make this on my own”.
“I don’t have the energy for this any more”
“I want to make the most of everything I’ve been given”.
Isn’t all of that, to a greater or lesser degree, a plea for help?
It is for the Psalmist.
“I lift my eyes to the hills” he says
And seeing those hills – the challenges and opportunities that lie on his horizon – he asks himself “Where’s my help? Where does my help come from?”
And he himself supplies the answer.– “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth”. The God who made all things. Who made me. Who knows me, and this path in life that I have to follow.
I might not know where all this is going, but God knows.
I might not think I can make it on my own, but I’m not on my own.
I might not have the energy for this journey, but he can empower me through his Spirit.
Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord the maker of heaven and earth.
But what does that help look like?
Well here we have to be careful as we read on in the Psalm, because if we took things literally we’d be in trouble.
If the Psalmist really meant that God wouldn’t let our foot slip, or let the sun hurt us by day or the moon by night then we could all climb Ben Nevis in wintertime wearing khaki shorts and sandshoes and be perfectly safe!
And that’s not what’s being said. We know that faith isn’t a talisman that protects us from harm.
But there are a couple of promises to hold onto here.
Firstly – God is alert to our needs. All our needs.
Did you notice how many times the Psalmist speaks about God being awake and alert?
v3 – Your protector is always awake.
v4 – the protector of Israel never slumbers or sleeps.
v5 – the Lord will guard you
v7 – the Lord will protect you; he will keep you safe.
The pagan gods of the day were too human by far. The followers of the idol Baal thought they had to waken him up by shouting and cutting themselves in their religious rituals.
But Israel’s God was always near; always concerned; always watching.
Not just in the big things, but in the small things, because they mattered too.
So God is alert to our needs. But secondly, what about this promise of protection? This is where we feel a tension.
What do all these promises mean if we’re not to take them literally?
What good is a promise to keep us safe from harm, when we know that harm comes to people we love, and people who love God, all the time?
Well I guess my answer to that is to ask a question. It’s an annoying habit, I know, but I learned it from Jesus, so that makes it ok!
What is God promising to keep safe in this Psalm? Is it our bodies? Because if so, it’s a pretty empty promise. Christians get sick. They break legs. They fall off mountains. We know that.
No – I think there’s another way to understand this.
What God’s promising to protect is our future with him. The wellbeing of our souls, both now and forever, as it says in verse 8.
Any responsible reading of the lives of any of the key characters in Scripture shows that they all faced trouble and hardship. But in keeping their eyes on God throughout that trouble, they kept their faith. Doubt didn’t destroy it. Crises didn’t corrode it.
Elsewhere in the Bible, following God is described like being on a path. Jesus’ first disciples were called ‘followers of the Way”. God’s saying “Stick with me and I won’t let you slip off the path.”
The real challenges that face you – the sun by day – and the worries that haunt your dreams – the moon by night – will not harm you if you remember that I am by your side. I will protect you. I will keep you safe.
Is that making more sense? I hope so, because that seems to chime with a whole lot of other stuff that we find in Scripture.
In an age when the church was being cruelly persecuted, the apostle Paul wrote these words to the church in Rome, which would have met within walking distance of the bloodied sands of the Coliseum.
What can separate us from the love of Christ?
Can affliction or hardship?
Can persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger or sword?
I am convinced that there is nothing in death or life,
In the realm of spirits or spiritual powers,
in the world as it is or the world as it shall be,
in the forces of the universe,
in heights or depths - nothing in all creation
that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Whatever befalls, nothing can separate us from God, in life or in death.
Nowhere in Scripture are we promised an escape from trouble, and Psalm 121 is no exception. But what we are promised, again and again, is that God is with us in our struggles and they will not have the last word on our lives unless we let them.
As somebody once observed, a ship can stay afloat in almost every storm, as long as the water doesn’t get inside.
So the next time you find yourself gazing out of a train window, or into the embers of a fire, or through the TV screen; when you find yourself lifting your eyes to the hills and wondering what on earth lies ahead, try looking a little further and a little higher. Because beyond the hills is the maker of heaven and earth, and a future, in him, that’s secure.
Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own - Psalm 120
We begin our journey in a strange place this morning.
Last Sunday I introduced you to the Psalms of Ascent.; 15 songs that were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great festivals of their faith.
And the first in the series is the Psalm we read together earlier. Psalm 120. And what a strange way to begin it is.
If it were up to me, I’d have chosen something a bit lighter. Something with a tune you could whistle as you threw your rucksack over your shoulder and made ready to go.
But Psalm 120 starts with distress; majors on deceit and punishment; and then ends with war. All in the space of seven short verses. Sets you off with a spring in your step!
It jars. There’s no other way to describe it.
Either somebody’s got their numbers mixed up and we were meant to start with Psalm 121 – which is much more upbeat – or there’s something going on here that’s deliberately provocative and demands that we take a closer look. And I’m absolutely sure it’s the latter.
This Psalm’s been placed here on purpose.
And the purpose is to call our view of the world into question.
And that’s what I want to do this morning too.
You see, from our mothers’ arms, we grow up surrounded by a powerful illusion as to how the world is; and it runs like this:
Human beings are basically nice and good. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. And any problems we have in life can be solved on our own with a little more time, ingenuity and effort.
It sounds great, and we really want to believe it. Maybe many of us do believe it, and who could blame us? because like all good lies it’s very plausible and there’s a degree of truth in it.
There’s much that’s good in humanity; this world we live in is a beautiful place. We have achieved great things over the course of human history.
I’m not questioning that for a moment, and neither’s the Psalmist.
But that is only half the truth. And if we insist on living as though it were the whole truth, we’re living a lie.
We’re pretending everything’s fine, when really we know that this world we live in is far from fine.
Maybe, if we’re lucky enough and wealthy enough, we can insulate ourselves from the pain of living sufficiently well to keep kidding ourselves that everything’s fine. But that’s a luxury that most of the world can’t afford.
There’s something deeply wrong with this wonderful world, and try as we might, we can’t pretend it away.
Christian theology talks about the fall, and whether you understand the Adam and Eve story literally or take it as metaphor, the point is the same. The world is the way it is because humanity stopped living God’s way and started living its own way. God was pushed to the margins, and with him safely off the scene we set about refashioning the world in our own image. We have made it what it is.
The other day I picked up a magazine my father-in-law gets which gives you a summary of the week’s news from around the globe.
“Britain’s Feral Children” was the headline, looking at that case in Doncaster when two brothers aged 10 and 11 decided to torture two other children to within an inch of their lives.
There were pictures of the three Muslim bombers who - in God’s name - tried to blow up transatlantic jets with liquid explosives.
There was further talk about al-Megrahi and Libya; drug seizures in Ibiza; the BNP getting a slot on Question time.
There was a story from Mexico where 17 recovering addicts were taken out of a rehab centre and shot dead by members of a drugs cartel. This is just one more incident in the city of Ciudad Juarez where 1,400 people have been murdered this year because of drug crime.
450 new Israeli settlements were approved on the West Bank, killing whatever momentum the peace process had been gathering.
Ethnic violence in northwest China has seen 200 people killed and thousands more injured in recent days.
Iran continues to posture. The fighting in Helmand province claims more lives. Civilians are killed in collateral damage. Car bombs in Baghdad fail to shock us anymore.
What do we do with this stuff?
The overriding temptation in the Western world is to stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away. That way we don’t have to see it or read about it. We can keep the illusion of a happy world alive, as long as our little bit of the world’s happy.
But faith, Christian faith at least, asks us for more than that. It calls us to face the world as it is, in all its contradictory reality, and to realise that we cannot save ourselves.
We’ve had millennia to get it right. And we still haven’t managed it. We have food, but the poor still die of hunger. We crave peace, but the innocent still get blown apart in war. We champion equality but the ‘haves’ continue to live at the expense of the ‘have-nots’ while the planet slowly goes into meltdown.
Our atheist friends blame it all on religion. But the past century saw the demise of religion in the Western World, and if anything things got even worse! Many of you tell me that you see that in your own lifetime.
If we could get it right on our own we’d have done it by now. But we can’t.
So forgive me if I sound weary this morning, but I’m not prepared to brush this under the carpet and pretend it’s all ok. Because it’s so clearly not ok.
When we reckon seriously with how the world is, we find ourselves sitting alongside the Psalmist in the dust and sighing from the depths of our hearts: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.
Distress. That’s where this Psalm begins.
But thank God it’s not where it ends.
Because there are two ways we can go, once we’ve accepted the reality of the way things are. The way of despair, which is static. Or the way the Psalmist chooses – which is dynamic.
What does he do?
Well he opens his mouth. He doesn’t bury his head in the sand; he doesn’t sit, paralysed in despondency. This swell of anger and disappointment he’s feeling at the ways things are spills over and he voices it all to God.
“I call on the Lord in my distress” he says.
I wonder where you go in your distress? What’s realest for you in those moments? Is God real for you then? Do you look to him?
“I call on the Lord in my distress” says the Psalmist.
And what does he say to God?
“Save me”. “Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and deceitful tongues”.
Save me from a world that tries to push you to the margins
Save me from people who talk of peace but don’t pursue it.
Save me from the illusions that tell us we can do this by ourselves.
Because we can’t.
God, we need you.
Are you beginning to see now why this Psalm is first among the Psalms of the ascent?
The realisation that we need God more than anything is the prod in the back that gets us moving as pilgrims or disciples.
If we’re content with how things are we’ve no reason to move or to change. Why would we bother going up to Jerusalem? Why would we drag ourselves out of bed every Sunday morning to get to Belhelvie church? As long as we keep believing the illusion that everything’s fine, there’s no reason to be here!
But if we listen to the voice of our own weariness – weariness with this world that’s never at peace, and this self that’s rarely at peace either – then we’ll be in a place where we’re ready to move because we’ll know deep in our bones that what God has in store for us is better by far.
Christians have a word for that movement that starts us off on the road of pilgrimage and discipleship. It’s the word repentance. And though that word comes to us covered in the dust of the ages, its meaning is very simple. It just means changing the way you think and learning to live in a different way. It means leaving the community of those who think they can get by without God, and joining the community of those who know they can’t get by without God.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way:
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding you were wrong in thinking that you had or could get the strength, education, training to make it on your own; its deciding you have been sold an illusion about yourself, your neighbours and the world.
And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.
Repentance is the realisation that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. It puts a person in touch with the reality God creates.”
One day, 23 years ago,
I got fed up of living among the tents of Meshech and Kedar
And I decided to leave.
I knew I couldn’t change all the things that are wrong with the world;
but I believed God could start to change me,
and maybe, through me,
the little bit of the world I happen to live in.
How about you?
Have you decided yet?
Are you still buying the illusion that we can do this by ourselves,
or are you weary enough to trust God for change?
Let me close with some words from one of my favourite books of the past ten years. It’s called “Life After God” and it’s by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland.
Coupland himself has no religious commitment, and for me that makes this piece of writing all the more remarkable. Throughout the book, the world-weary hero has been looking everywhere to try and fill the emptiness he’s feeling. He’s done drugs, he’s been in and out of relationships. And then, in the last chapter of the book he takes himself off deep into the woods, and as you read you find yourself wondering if this is going to be the end for him.
But it’s not. He finds a waterfall and a plunge pool deep in the forest at the foot of the mountains, and stripping off he inches himself forward into the freezing pool in a ritual that, for him, is something like a baptism.
And on the very last page he opens up to the reader and makes this startling confession:
Now - here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me to be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me to love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
There’s only a hairs breadth between those words and the words of our Psalm this morning. Nothing has changed in 30 centuries.
And it’s to God’s glory that he can take our justifiable world-weariness and turn it into a hunger for himself. A hunger that makes us set out on the road we call discipleship, singing the words of Psalm 120 as we go.
“I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.
Last Sunday I introduced you to the Psalms of Ascent.; 15 songs that were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great festivals of their faith.
And the first in the series is the Psalm we read together earlier. Psalm 120. And what a strange way to begin it is.
If it were up to me, I’d have chosen something a bit lighter. Something with a tune you could whistle as you threw your rucksack over your shoulder and made ready to go.
But Psalm 120 starts with distress; majors on deceit and punishment; and then ends with war. All in the space of seven short verses. Sets you off with a spring in your step!
It jars. There’s no other way to describe it.
Either somebody’s got their numbers mixed up and we were meant to start with Psalm 121 – which is much more upbeat – or there’s something going on here that’s deliberately provocative and demands that we take a closer look. And I’m absolutely sure it’s the latter.
This Psalm’s been placed here on purpose.
And the purpose is to call our view of the world into question.
And that’s what I want to do this morning too.
You see, from our mothers’ arms, we grow up surrounded by a powerful illusion as to how the world is; and it runs like this:
Human beings are basically nice and good. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. And any problems we have in life can be solved on our own with a little more time, ingenuity and effort.
It sounds great, and we really want to believe it. Maybe many of us do believe it, and who could blame us? because like all good lies it’s very plausible and there’s a degree of truth in it.
There’s much that’s good in humanity; this world we live in is a beautiful place. We have achieved great things over the course of human history.
I’m not questioning that for a moment, and neither’s the Psalmist.
But that is only half the truth. And if we insist on living as though it were the whole truth, we’re living a lie.
We’re pretending everything’s fine, when really we know that this world we live in is far from fine.
Maybe, if we’re lucky enough and wealthy enough, we can insulate ourselves from the pain of living sufficiently well to keep kidding ourselves that everything’s fine. But that’s a luxury that most of the world can’t afford.
There’s something deeply wrong with this wonderful world, and try as we might, we can’t pretend it away.
Christian theology talks about the fall, and whether you understand the Adam and Eve story literally or take it as metaphor, the point is the same. The world is the way it is because humanity stopped living God’s way and started living its own way. God was pushed to the margins, and with him safely off the scene we set about refashioning the world in our own image. We have made it what it is.
The other day I picked up a magazine my father-in-law gets which gives you a summary of the week’s news from around the globe.
“Britain’s Feral Children” was the headline, looking at that case in Doncaster when two brothers aged 10 and 11 decided to torture two other children to within an inch of their lives.
There were pictures of the three Muslim bombers who - in God’s name - tried to blow up transatlantic jets with liquid explosives.
There was further talk about al-Megrahi and Libya; drug seizures in Ibiza; the BNP getting a slot on Question time.
There was a story from Mexico where 17 recovering addicts were taken out of a rehab centre and shot dead by members of a drugs cartel. This is just one more incident in the city of Ciudad Juarez where 1,400 people have been murdered this year because of drug crime.
450 new Israeli settlements were approved on the West Bank, killing whatever momentum the peace process had been gathering.
Ethnic violence in northwest China has seen 200 people killed and thousands more injured in recent days.
Iran continues to posture. The fighting in Helmand province claims more lives. Civilians are killed in collateral damage. Car bombs in Baghdad fail to shock us anymore.
What do we do with this stuff?
The overriding temptation in the Western world is to stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away. That way we don’t have to see it or read about it. We can keep the illusion of a happy world alive, as long as our little bit of the world’s happy.
But faith, Christian faith at least, asks us for more than that. It calls us to face the world as it is, in all its contradictory reality, and to realise that we cannot save ourselves.
We’ve had millennia to get it right. And we still haven’t managed it. We have food, but the poor still die of hunger. We crave peace, but the innocent still get blown apart in war. We champion equality but the ‘haves’ continue to live at the expense of the ‘have-nots’ while the planet slowly goes into meltdown.
Our atheist friends blame it all on religion. But the past century saw the demise of religion in the Western World, and if anything things got even worse! Many of you tell me that you see that in your own lifetime.
If we could get it right on our own we’d have done it by now. But we can’t.
So forgive me if I sound weary this morning, but I’m not prepared to brush this under the carpet and pretend it’s all ok. Because it’s so clearly not ok.
When we reckon seriously with how the world is, we find ourselves sitting alongside the Psalmist in the dust and sighing from the depths of our hearts: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.
Distress. That’s where this Psalm begins.
But thank God it’s not where it ends.
Because there are two ways we can go, once we’ve accepted the reality of the way things are. The way of despair, which is static. Or the way the Psalmist chooses – which is dynamic.
What does he do?
Well he opens his mouth. He doesn’t bury his head in the sand; he doesn’t sit, paralysed in despondency. This swell of anger and disappointment he’s feeling at the ways things are spills over and he voices it all to God.
“I call on the Lord in my distress” he says.
I wonder where you go in your distress? What’s realest for you in those moments? Is God real for you then? Do you look to him?
“I call on the Lord in my distress” says the Psalmist.
And what does he say to God?
“Save me”. “Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and deceitful tongues”.
Save me from a world that tries to push you to the margins
Save me from people who talk of peace but don’t pursue it.
Save me from the illusions that tell us we can do this by ourselves.
Because we can’t.
God, we need you.
Are you beginning to see now why this Psalm is first among the Psalms of the ascent?
The realisation that we need God more than anything is the prod in the back that gets us moving as pilgrims or disciples.
If we’re content with how things are we’ve no reason to move or to change. Why would we bother going up to Jerusalem? Why would we drag ourselves out of bed every Sunday morning to get to Belhelvie church? As long as we keep believing the illusion that everything’s fine, there’s no reason to be here!
But if we listen to the voice of our own weariness – weariness with this world that’s never at peace, and this self that’s rarely at peace either – then we’ll be in a place where we’re ready to move because we’ll know deep in our bones that what God has in store for us is better by far.
Christians have a word for that movement that starts us off on the road of pilgrimage and discipleship. It’s the word repentance. And though that word comes to us covered in the dust of the ages, its meaning is very simple. It just means changing the way you think and learning to live in a different way. It means leaving the community of those who think they can get by without God, and joining the community of those who know they can’t get by without God.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way:
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding you were wrong in thinking that you had or could get the strength, education, training to make it on your own; its deciding you have been sold an illusion about yourself, your neighbours and the world.
And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.
Repentance is the realisation that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. It puts a person in touch with the reality God creates.”
One day, 23 years ago,
I got fed up of living among the tents of Meshech and Kedar
And I decided to leave.
I knew I couldn’t change all the things that are wrong with the world;
but I believed God could start to change me,
and maybe, through me,
the little bit of the world I happen to live in.
How about you?
Have you decided yet?
Are you still buying the illusion that we can do this by ourselves,
or are you weary enough to trust God for change?
Let me close with some words from one of my favourite books of the past ten years. It’s called “Life After God” and it’s by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland.
Coupland himself has no religious commitment, and for me that makes this piece of writing all the more remarkable. Throughout the book, the world-weary hero has been looking everywhere to try and fill the emptiness he’s feeling. He’s done drugs, he’s been in and out of relationships. And then, in the last chapter of the book he takes himself off deep into the woods, and as you read you find yourself wondering if this is going to be the end for him.
But it’s not. He finds a waterfall and a plunge pool deep in the forest at the foot of the mountains, and stripping off he inches himself forward into the freezing pool in a ritual that, for him, is something like a baptism.
And on the very last page he opens up to the reader and makes this startling confession:
Now - here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me to be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me to love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
There’s only a hairs breadth between those words and the words of our Psalm this morning. Nothing has changed in 30 centuries.
And it’s to God’s glory that he can take our justifiable world-weariness and turn it into a hunger for himself. A hunger that makes us set out on the road we call discipleship, singing the words of Psalm 120 as we go.
“I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)