“Work fascinates me” – somebody once said. “I can stare at it for hours”.
Psalm 124 has felt like work this week. If my eyes were magnifying glasses I’d have burned a hole in the page with all hours of staring I’ve done at Psalm 124.
And isn’t because I don’t understand it. I understand it just fine.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to preach the kind of exegetical, historical sermon that ministers preach when they run out of real things to say.
But that’s not what you need. And it’s not what I need either.
Sunday by Sunday as we open ourselves up to these ancient texts, what we’re looking for isn’t primarily knowledge. It’s wisdom. Insight that helps us live well and deepen our experience of God.
And like a man wandering round a statue in a museum, I found myself looking prayerfully at Ps 124 from every angle and coming away feeling unmoved and none the wiser. How’s that for a confession! Ministers shouldn’t feel that way, should they?!
And yet, why not? We’re only human. We don’t have a direct line to the Almighty giving us a drip feed of inspiration. Our moods go up and down depending on tiredness, exercise and appetite. We have spells when we feel close to God and times when we wonder if this is all just an exercise in self-delusion. In short, I’m no different from you, just because I happen to be ordained. But I digress.
I looked hard at the Psalm this week and found that nothing moved me. Not a nice feeling when it’s your job to preach on Sunday.
But rather than fall back onto dull historical exegesis for the sake of getting something down on paper, I tried to drag my lack of inspiration into the light and look at it more clearly.
I said - God, why is this Psalm not moving me?
And that’s when things started to get interesting. Ideas began to tumble out like kids getting off a bus at a funfair and racing off in all kinds of directions. And rather than try to corral them all, I managed to round up two or three of the little brats and wipe their noses and smooth down their hair so they could be respectably presented to you this morning.
So here’s the first wee insight I want to offer.
The Psalmist begins with these words: “What if the Lord had not been on our side?”. And I found myself wondering how I would finish that Psalm if it had been me writing it. What if the Lord had not been on my side? I wondered. In all honesty, would I see much difference in the way my life had panned out?
You see Israel had this amazing history. They had been captives in Egypt for over 400 years, and then with signs and wonders God led them out of slavery through Moses. Parting the Red-sea, annihilating their slave masters, providing for them on this arduous journey though the desert that took another 40 years; helping them conquer much more powerful tribes around them so they could finally settle in the promised land.
And with that history, they could look back and say “If God hadn’t been on our side, none of that would have happened! Our enemies would have destroyed us! The waters would have carried us away”.
They had this huge story to tell.
But my story isn’t huge; it’s rather ordinary, to be honest. And I’m pretty sure that’s the same for most of you.
We’ve all read about folk with these remarkable testimonies of where they were before they came to faith and how things have turned around for them: and God bless them.
But most of us haven’t had that kind of a journey.
Put our ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures side by side, and you’d have to look pretty closely to see the difference. Or maybe there is no before or after for you – maybe you’ve always had some level of faith and would struggle to point to a time or place that might be called a conversion.
So given that, how would you finish this Psalm? How would I finish it? What would we have to say? Has God made a difference to our lives? That was my first thought. And I have to say, it made me feel more than a little guilty. I remembered a poster from my student days that said “if you were put on trial for the crime of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”. Makes you think, doesn't it?
But hot on the heels of that, came a second thought which is a little more encouraging.
Most of the people that we read about in the Scriptures seem larger than life. By definition, we end up reading their stories not necessarily because they were remarkable people, but because they had a remarkable role to play in God’s unfolding plans.
Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, Peter, Paul.
Ordinary in one sense, and yet playing an extraordinary part in the story. And that’s why we read about them and try to learn from their experience.
But here’s the thing. For every name in Scripture we know, there are 10,000 names of faithful men and women we never get to hear about. Men and women just going about the ordinary things of their lives with simple trust and faith.
You and I aren’t called to be Moses or Paul or Mary or Ruth and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for that. We’re called to be who God has made us to be, and to love and serve him in the place he’s put us in. If we do that faithfully, he may do wonderful things through us. But that’s his business, not ours.
Israel had this dramatic story to tell. But for ordinary folk like us, all that drama might be hard to relate to. Maybe it’s ok if our stories aren't as gripping, as long as we have something to say when people ask us what difference it makes having God in our lives.
Third thought.
The Psalmist says “What if the Lord had not been on our side”?
What does it look like and feel like, when God is on our side?
That one’s really worth thinking about.
I remember when I first started playing rugby at secondary school. There were a couple of lads in the team who were really big for their age – I mean, 5’6 and 10 stone in first year – big solid farmer’s boys. They were twice the size of most of us!
And when we lined up with them on our side, the opposition were quaking in their boots! All we had to do was get the ball to Booth or Hayburn and they’d do the rest. Those of you who watch rugby will remember the ’95 world Cup when Jonah Lomu ran through the England back line like they were made of straw. It was a bit like that.
You know, a few years later it was a different story. Suddenly everybody had grown a few inches and put on a few pounds. These farmers lads were still good players, but it wasn’t a walk in the park for us any more. We still won more than we lost, but everybody left the field bloodied and bruised.
Having God on your side is much more like the second experience of rugby than the first. No-one comes off the park without a few cuts and bruises.
Sometimes people assume, wrongly, that having God on your side is going to make everything like a walk in the park. Some ministers preach like that, some Christians try to sell the faith to others on that basis.
But they’re just plain wrong.
The Psalmist doesn’t say “The Lord was on our side. Great! Nothing happened to us. We were fine!”
He says “when our enemies attacked us”, “when they got furious with us”, “when the floods came and the waters threatened to cover us”. In other words, bad stuff still came our way. But in the midst of those things, God was on our side.
I know I thump this particular tub on a regular basis, but I keep coming up against this issue pastorally. When troubles come, as they will, folk often take that as a sign of God’s anger, or worse still, his abandonment.
So let me say this once again, loud and clear. Having God on your side doesn’t preserve you from troubles. It preserves you in them.
It’s right there in the Psalm.
“Let us thank the Lord”. Why? Because he kept us from all harm? No – we thank him because he has not let our enemies destroy us.
If you have faith, you won't be destroyed, even when life hands you a beating.
That bereavement you suffered? We’ll you’re still here. And day after day a little more healing takes place.
That illness you’re fighting? You can't stop what it's doing to your body, but you're determined that whatever happens, you’re not going to let it break your spirit.
Those circumstances you’re facing? Your powerless to change them, maybe, but you’ve decided you're not going to let them rule over you.
Why? Because you know that these things don’t have the last word on your life. God has the last word. And you trust him to make it a good word.
And that brings me to the final thing I want to say this morning.
I’ve already mentioned this Psalm looks back to the Exodus, the great formative event in the life of the people of Israel.
But when Christians read about the Exodus, they always see a deeper meaning in those stories, because for us, Moses and his work of liberation was just a foreshadow of Jesus and his work of salvation.
Moses saved Israel from slavery in Egypt. But Jesus’ work saved us eternally from the power of sin and death. His was a second Exodus with eternal consequences.
And in a way, this morning’s Psalm could have been written with Jesus in mind, even though it was penned about a thousand years before his birth.
He took the worst the world could throw at him including abuse, suspicion, betrayal and an agonizing death. Take a snapshot of his life at any one of a score of different times and you could be forgiven for saying “If God’s on his side, why’s that happening?”.
And yet God was on his side; and his resurrection was the final proof of that.
“Let us thank the Lord, who has not let our enemies destroy us.” says the Psalmist
We have escaped like a bird from a hunter’s trap;
the trap is broken and we are free!”.
Those words resonate down through the centuries. Spoken first by the Psalmist, but taken up by Christ as he stands smiling, beside an empty tomb.
The trap is broken and we are free.
That great Exodus story is the backdrop against which the Christian lives out his or her little life. That great story, and its consequences, are the end toward which we are living. The death of death and all that goes with it, and the coming of new life even now.
John Calvin once said that the church is a place of many resurrections. And he was right.
These lives we lead might not seem extraordinary set alongside the story of Israel, or the great heroes of the church. And the truth is, there are times when we find ourselves unmoved, perplexed or even angry as we try to walk with God.
But every act of kindness, every Godward movement, every setting aside of the wrong and embracing of the right is a mini resurrection. A sign of the work God’s begun in us, and as sure as Christ is risen, will one day bring to completion.
That’s the hope Psalm 124 brings us.
Those long hours of head-scratching helped me see that in the end, this Psalm isn’t about us and what we do. It’s about God and what he’s doing.
He’s in the process of saving this world from all that mars it.
And throughout it all, he’s on our side.
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