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.
Monday, 26 October 2009
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”.
Learning How To Live: Proverbs 2:1-8
Given my country of birth,
I generally try to avoid racial stereotypes
because the moment I crack a joke about the mean Scotsman
or the well-spoken Englishman,
there are two dozen “thick Irishman” stories waiting in the wings.
But the reason these things become stereotypes
is that there’s just a hint of truth in them.
A stereotype that’s less familiar to us is that of the Jewish mother who, particularly in the United States, is seen as demanding and possessive of her children.
The Jewish Novelist Chaim Potok tells us that as a young man, his well-meaning mother did everything she could to dissuade him from becoming a writer. She didn’t see any future in it for him,
She’d listen to his reasons for wanting to write, and then she’d say – “Son – you should forget that. You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.
This went on and on. Every time he came home from college he got the same things: “Chaim - You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.
As the years progressed, the exchanges became more and more tense until one day Potok exploded at her when she trotted out her usual line: “Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying! I want to show them how to live!”.
I want to show them how to live.
Does that line grab you?
It grabs me.
Isn’t there something within all of us
that wants to learn how to live?
Doesn’t that line speak to the parts of us
Where we struggle,
where we hurt
and where we hope for better things?
Let’s put an image to that: (image of a half-full pint glass)
Straight away some of you are saying ‘half-full’ and others are saying ‘half empty’. But that’s another discussion. Today, all I want you to realise is that whether the glass is half full or half empty - it’s half! It’s not complete.
That’s a picture of your life and mine. We’re not yet complete! There’s more to experience. Deeper, fuller life to experience.
So far we’ve spent forty, fifty, sixty years on this planet. We’ve come this far; we’ve managed to get by. But have we made much progress in learning how to live?
How do I live at peace with myself; with the body, mind and soul I’ve been given, with all of their limitations?
How do I live with these wonderful, sometimes maddening people that God brings into my life?
How do I live toward the things that will feed my soul, so that when I look back on the time I’ve had I can say “I lived well; I lived wisely. Je ne regrette rien!”
I want to learn how to live.
Do those words find an echo in your heart this morning?
I hope so,
But where do we go to find the answers?
Well the world has no shortage of instant, pre-packaged solutions.
If you want answers, go see a shrink. Get some therapy.
If you don’t have the money for that, go to Waterstones and pick up an armful of the latest self-help guides.
If all else fails, try avoiding the issue altogether and fill yourself up on consumables. Go shopping. Get some retail therapy. Buy another gadget. Pretty soon you’ll be too busy to care.
But the solutions they offer are just band-aids over a deep wound. There are no quick and easy answers to the enigma of our own lives. If there were, we’d have found them by now!
And the irony of modern life is that in an age that promises so much, that promises us quick fixes, people are more disconnected from God, self, and neighbour than ever before.
And yet, tucked away in many of our homes, stuck in a drawer somewhere or boxed up in the attic, is an old songbook which – if read carefully and prayerfully – can help us in this business of learning how to live.
It’s a songbook that nestles among the pages of the Psalms in the Old Testament – 15 Psalms, numbered 120-134, that are known as the Psalms of the Ascent.
They’re ancient – probably around 3000 years old, many of them. And they would have been sung as people left their homes and workplaces and made the journey up to Jerusalem for the three great Feasts of their faith – Passover in Spring, Pentecost in Summer and Tabernacles in early Autumn.
Each feast celebrated part of Israel’s story – Passover celebrated their deliverance from Egypt, Pentecost the giving of the law at Sinai, and Tabernacles, God’s provision for them as they journeyed through the desert.
And generations afterwards, these songs would have been sung by pilgrims as they made their way up the long, winding roads to Jerusalem, which sat high above the other towns and villages in Israel.
They’re songs for people who are travelling. Who are wanting to learn how to live. And they deal with the stuff of life.
These songs talk about how rough life can be; how distant God can seem; how close, sometimes. They talk about neighbours, family, friends and enemies. They talk about hope and also despair. They talk about faith, but they deal honestly with doubt.
It’s all there. There’s nothing new under the sun. Everything we’re likely to feel or experience in life is caught up in those 15 Psalms.
And over the next few months we’re going to be reading them together on Sundays. But not so you can become experts in them, because the Psalms themselves are not the focus. God’s the focus. You’re the focus.
Because what these Psalms show us is what happens when people realise that God is not a legend consigned to the pages of history, but a living, active presence who’s with us in all things and who wants, more than anything, to show us how to live.
God wants to show you how to live.
That’s what the writer of Proverbs is telling us this morning.
You turn your ear to wisdom, you apply your heart to understanding, you look for it as for silver, you search for it as for hidden treasure, and you will find it. You will learn, you will understand, you will grow. You will learn how to live.
But only if you’re hungry enough. Only if you really want it.
This series we’re embarking on, looking at the Psalms of ascent, isn’t going to be a guided tour of the past. What we’re going to do is mine the past for wisdom that can help us live well in the present.
And as we journey together, it’s my hope that all of us will learn to do what those ancient pilgrims did as they set aside their ploughs and their axes, their pots and pans and made ready to go. As they journeyed, they learned to pray what they were living and to live out what they prayed.
And in so doing, they learned how to live.
May God bless us with that same insight in the days to come.
Now in closing, let me say a word about the envelope in your hand, because it ties in with what I’m saying this morning. Open them up just now.
On 27th September we’re taking part in a national initiative called Back to Church Sunday, and the idea is that our regular members think hard, pluck up their courage, and invite someone they know to come along to church on that particular day.
The idea isn’t so much to ask along people who’ve never been, but people who, for whatever reason, have come in the past and have stopped attending.
Maybe there’s someone like that in your family, or your circle of friends, or your street. And maybe they’re waiting for someone like you to take the initiative and ask them along.
Maybe all it takes is someone being brave enough to ask.
Statistics show, time and again, that most people who aren’t regular churchgoers, find their way back into church life because a friend invited them along.
This piece of paper you have in your hands now is an invitation to do just that. It’s an invitation not only to the people you’re thinking of, but to you as well, because in receiving this piece of paper you’re being invited on a journey, like the pilgrims who sang those Psalms on the way up to Jerusalem.
You’re being asked to leave behind the comfort of what you know, and take a risk. To exercise that faith a little, by making a point of asking someone along on the 27th.
Now I know that some of you won’t find that easy. I don’t think I’m going to find it easy. But I know this too – if nothing’s ventured in life, nothing’s gained.
So take a look at that piece of paper in your hand. It belongs to you now. It’s every bit as much a part of this communion service as the bread and the wine we’re shortly to take together and I believe God wants us to treat it with the same reverence.
What will you do with it? Will you accept the invitation to step out in faith, believing that the God we worship isn’t a legend, but a living presence who can work in you and through you for the sake of the world?
God wants us to learn how to live. But we can’t do that from the security of our armchairs or our pews. We need to get going. We need to gather our courage and take a step of faith. That’s the invitation that comes to you as we gather round the Lord’s Table this morning.
I generally try to avoid racial stereotypes
because the moment I crack a joke about the mean Scotsman
or the well-spoken Englishman,
there are two dozen “thick Irishman” stories waiting in the wings.
But the reason these things become stereotypes
is that there’s just a hint of truth in them.
A stereotype that’s less familiar to us is that of the Jewish mother who, particularly in the United States, is seen as demanding and possessive of her children.
The Jewish Novelist Chaim Potok tells us that as a young man, his well-meaning mother did everything she could to dissuade him from becoming a writer. She didn’t see any future in it for him,
She’d listen to his reasons for wanting to write, and then she’d say – “Son – you should forget that. You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.
This went on and on. Every time he came home from college he got the same things: “Chaim - You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.
As the years progressed, the exchanges became more and more tense until one day Potok exploded at her when she trotted out her usual line: “Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying! I want to show them how to live!”.
I want to show them how to live.
Does that line grab you?
It grabs me.
Isn’t there something within all of us
that wants to learn how to live?
Doesn’t that line speak to the parts of us
Where we struggle,
where we hurt
and where we hope for better things?
Let’s put an image to that: (image of a half-full pint glass)
Straight away some of you are saying ‘half-full’ and others are saying ‘half empty’. But that’s another discussion. Today, all I want you to realise is that whether the glass is half full or half empty - it’s half! It’s not complete.
That’s a picture of your life and mine. We’re not yet complete! There’s more to experience. Deeper, fuller life to experience.
So far we’ve spent forty, fifty, sixty years on this planet. We’ve come this far; we’ve managed to get by. But have we made much progress in learning how to live?
How do I live at peace with myself; with the body, mind and soul I’ve been given, with all of their limitations?
How do I live with these wonderful, sometimes maddening people that God brings into my life?
How do I live toward the things that will feed my soul, so that when I look back on the time I’ve had I can say “I lived well; I lived wisely. Je ne regrette rien!”
I want to learn how to live.
Do those words find an echo in your heart this morning?
I hope so,
But where do we go to find the answers?
Well the world has no shortage of instant, pre-packaged solutions.
If you want answers, go see a shrink. Get some therapy.
If you don’t have the money for that, go to Waterstones and pick up an armful of the latest self-help guides.
If all else fails, try avoiding the issue altogether and fill yourself up on consumables. Go shopping. Get some retail therapy. Buy another gadget. Pretty soon you’ll be too busy to care.
But the solutions they offer are just band-aids over a deep wound. There are no quick and easy answers to the enigma of our own lives. If there were, we’d have found them by now!
And the irony of modern life is that in an age that promises so much, that promises us quick fixes, people are more disconnected from God, self, and neighbour than ever before.
And yet, tucked away in many of our homes, stuck in a drawer somewhere or boxed up in the attic, is an old songbook which – if read carefully and prayerfully – can help us in this business of learning how to live.
It’s a songbook that nestles among the pages of the Psalms in the Old Testament – 15 Psalms, numbered 120-134, that are known as the Psalms of the Ascent.
They’re ancient – probably around 3000 years old, many of them. And they would have been sung as people left their homes and workplaces and made the journey up to Jerusalem for the three great Feasts of their faith – Passover in Spring, Pentecost in Summer and Tabernacles in early Autumn.
Each feast celebrated part of Israel’s story – Passover celebrated their deliverance from Egypt, Pentecost the giving of the law at Sinai, and Tabernacles, God’s provision for them as they journeyed through the desert.
And generations afterwards, these songs would have been sung by pilgrims as they made their way up the long, winding roads to Jerusalem, which sat high above the other towns and villages in Israel.
They’re songs for people who are travelling. Who are wanting to learn how to live. And they deal with the stuff of life.
These songs talk about how rough life can be; how distant God can seem; how close, sometimes. They talk about neighbours, family, friends and enemies. They talk about hope and also despair. They talk about faith, but they deal honestly with doubt.
It’s all there. There’s nothing new under the sun. Everything we’re likely to feel or experience in life is caught up in those 15 Psalms.
And over the next few months we’re going to be reading them together on Sundays. But not so you can become experts in them, because the Psalms themselves are not the focus. God’s the focus. You’re the focus.
Because what these Psalms show us is what happens when people realise that God is not a legend consigned to the pages of history, but a living, active presence who’s with us in all things and who wants, more than anything, to show us how to live.
God wants to show you how to live.
That’s what the writer of Proverbs is telling us this morning.
You turn your ear to wisdom, you apply your heart to understanding, you look for it as for silver, you search for it as for hidden treasure, and you will find it. You will learn, you will understand, you will grow. You will learn how to live.
But only if you’re hungry enough. Only if you really want it.
This series we’re embarking on, looking at the Psalms of ascent, isn’t going to be a guided tour of the past. What we’re going to do is mine the past for wisdom that can help us live well in the present.
And as we journey together, it’s my hope that all of us will learn to do what those ancient pilgrims did as they set aside their ploughs and their axes, their pots and pans and made ready to go. As they journeyed, they learned to pray what they were living and to live out what they prayed.
And in so doing, they learned how to live.
May God bless us with that same insight in the days to come.
Now in closing, let me say a word about the envelope in your hand, because it ties in with what I’m saying this morning. Open them up just now.
On 27th September we’re taking part in a national initiative called Back to Church Sunday, and the idea is that our regular members think hard, pluck up their courage, and invite someone they know to come along to church on that particular day.
The idea isn’t so much to ask along people who’ve never been, but people who, for whatever reason, have come in the past and have stopped attending.
Maybe there’s someone like that in your family, or your circle of friends, or your street. And maybe they’re waiting for someone like you to take the initiative and ask them along.
Maybe all it takes is someone being brave enough to ask.
Statistics show, time and again, that most people who aren’t regular churchgoers, find their way back into church life because a friend invited them along.
This piece of paper you have in your hands now is an invitation to do just that. It’s an invitation not only to the people you’re thinking of, but to you as well, because in receiving this piece of paper you’re being invited on a journey, like the pilgrims who sang those Psalms on the way up to Jerusalem.
You’re being asked to leave behind the comfort of what you know, and take a risk. To exercise that faith a little, by making a point of asking someone along on the 27th.
Now I know that some of you won’t find that easy. I don’t think I’m going to find it easy. But I know this too – if nothing’s ventured in life, nothing’s gained.
So take a look at that piece of paper in your hand. It belongs to you now. It’s every bit as much a part of this communion service as the bread and the wine we’re shortly to take together and I believe God wants us to treat it with the same reverence.
What will you do with it? Will you accept the invitation to step out in faith, believing that the God we worship isn’t a legend, but a living presence who can work in you and through you for the sake of the world?
God wants us to learn how to live. But we can’t do that from the security of our armchairs or our pews. We need to get going. We need to gather our courage and take a step of faith. That’s the invitation that comes to you as we gather round the Lord’s Table this morning.
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