“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.
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