From the fields beside Bethlehem, to a rural setting in Ireland and some words of the poet Seamus Heaney:
Had I not been awake, I would have missed it,
a wind that rose and whirled until the roof
pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
and got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
alive and ticking like an electric fence:
had I not been awake, I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
and almost it seemed dangerously,
returning like an animal to the house,
a courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.
Sitting on our kitchen table at the moment is something both quirky and beautiful. It’s a kind of advent calendar, but it’s three dimensional – it’s in the shape of a church. And behind each closed door or shutter there’s a picture, painted on translucent paper, that looks like a stained glass window. And when you place a light inside the church, the opened windows all light up.
And on the back of the doors and the shutters, there are Bible verses for that particular day in Advent. And the verses for last Sunday – the first in Advent – kept harping on one theme, the same theme Heaney picks up in his poem.
“Had I not been awake, I would have missed it” he says.
“Stay awake” say the prophets and the gospel writers on the first Sunday in Advent. “Something is happening, and if you’re sleeping, you’ll miss it”.
For Heaney, it’s the whine of the wind and the sycamore leaves pattering on the roof that are happening. Ordinary enough, you’d guess. But it’s part of the poet’s gift to credit even the ordinary with significance, and though Heaney doesn’t tell us why this experience mattered to him, he leaves us in no doubt that it does. For him, it was…
“a courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.”
Something in that experience lingered with him. Continued to impress itself upon him.
“Had I not been awake, I would have missed it” he says.
“Stay awake” say the prophets and the gospel writers. Stay awake as you hear these familiar stories once more. If you don’t, you might miss something.
Part of what I love about the Christmas story is the way the ordinary and the extraordinary sit side by side apparently without embarrassment.
The sceptics want to rationalise it all and do away with the weirder parts that don’t fit with a modern worldview. The over-zealous idealise it all, as though the folk in the story were some kind of different breed, much more attuned to the workings of the Almighty than mere mortals like you and me.
But they weren’t. They were ordinary people, living ordinary lives until God showed up in ways they’d never expected. And our telling of the stories simplifies what must have been profound experiences for all of them.
Mary sweeps the floor and trips over an angel. An eccentric star lights the way to an insignificant, dirty byre. The cussing shepherds get a glimpse of heaven as they mind their sheep out in the hills. The saddle-sore scholars set kingly gifts at the feet of a peasant child.
Words can’t convey what on earth was going on in each of their lives at that time, but for a few short days, weeks and months, the ordinary and the extraordinary cohabited without shame in the events around the birth of Jesus. And those are the moments locked into our tradition; in our nativity scenes and our Christmas cards.
The glow from the stable; the shepherds shielding their eyes; the wise men bending low in their finery.
But then things return to normal, as much as they ever do.
Mary got on with the business of changing nappies, washing clothes and learning how to breast-feed. Joseph worried about how to feed, clothe and house his family as refugees in Egypt. The shepherds went back to their flocks and their arguments about wages. The wise men travelled back to their homeland and their families. And years went past; years full of ordinariness.
But deep in their souls they could never evade the courier blast of that first Christmas. It would never lapse ordinary. Not ever after. And not now.
They knew who this child was. And they knew what his coming amongst them meant. That the ordinary and the extraordinary – the human and the divine were only ever a hair’s breadth apart. That God is at work in the world, but it’s only those who stay awake who can discern him.
Are you awake this Christmas?
As you plan your menus and negotiate the shops and turn up to the parties in body if not in spirit, is there a part of you that knows that you’re sleepwalking through it all? Is there a part of you that begins to wake up when I tell you that the place God most wants to meet you isn’t in the rarified atmosphere of a church service, but in the ordinariness of your everday life?
Would it set your heart a-patter if I told you that God is already at work in your life in ways that you will only begin to discern when you’re fully awake to him?
Two folk take a walk through the same wood. One sees nothing. The other sees a deer’s tracks, a badgers’ sett, a rare wild flower and fourteen different kinds of tree. What’s the difference? One’s awake, the other’s not.
“Wake up” say the prophets and the gospel writers at the beginning of Advent.
“Wake up” says Seamus Heaney:
Why?
Because, had I not been awake, I would have missed it…
"A courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.”
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Eternity In The Heart
If you were to rifle through my DVD collection at home, every third or fourth disc would be some kind of stand-up comedian.
So I was really excited a week past on Friday when Bill Bailey came to the Exhibition Centre. Not only is he a good comic, he’s a really good musician as well. and in fairness to the man, we weren’t disappointed. It was a good show.
But there were a couple of sections that I found pretty uncomfortable, especially one where he was looking at different paintings of the encounter between the resurrected Jesus and doubting Thomas.
If you know that story, you’ll remember that Thomas refused to believe until he saw Christ with his own eyes and put his fingers into the wounds from his crucifixion.
And although the humour was pretty gentle, it’s part of a growing trend among many of the comedians I like to listen to – God bashing is in.
Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry and many others are all at it.
It feels a bit like the school bullies Dawkins, Hitchens and Pullman have done their bit, and now some of the smaller boys are emerging from their shadow to offer a few well-placed kicks in the direction of the Almighty.
Who can take it, of course. No Fatwas in Christianity, though some might welcome that.
But it’s just another instance of where our culture seems to be heading.
I had to switch off radio 5 last week because the comedian Richard Herring was on talking about his new book called Christ on a Bike in which he hopes to earn a few bob by holding the Ten Commandments up for ridicule. I couldn’t listen to more than 5 minutes of it because it was so badly informed and so darned smug!
Of course, he can ridicule all he likes – but I’m pretty sure if Richard came out of the BBC studios to find his car nicked, or came home to find his girlfriend murdered or in bed with his best friend, the relevance of the Ten Commandments might strike him with new force.
But God-bashing sells just now, and so the bandwagon continues to rumble on.
And what gets me about it is that the comedians, and even some of the intellectual heavyweights, speak of Christianity and Christians as though we were some monolithic group of mono-browed Luddites who cling to superstition, while at the same time they fall over themselves to adore the discoveries of science.
Religious belief is nonsense for the gullible; science is the light of the world, it seems.
Now as someone with a foot in both camps, that really gets my goat. Perhaps you’ve noticed!
The claims of religion, and it seems to be particularly the Christian religion, are held to be beyond belief. All that miraculous stuff has to be nonsense, they say. It’s just too weird to have any basis in reality.
Ok. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment.
Here are some of the things that science is telling us just now:
Science is telling us that it’s possible for a single particle to be in several places at once.
It’s telling us that space and time aren’t linear, they’re curved.
That the vast majority of matter in the Universe – 83% - is stuff that we know virtually nothing about, called ‘dark matter’. We can’t see it, we’ve never obtained a sample of it. We only know it’s there because of the effect it has on things we can see and measure.
Although we’re used to thinking in terms of four dimensions, the latest physics - string theory - is suggesting that in order to understand reality we may need to think in anything up to 11 dimensions.
It’s telling us that it may be possible to travel faster than the speed of light and go back in time – contrary to what Einstein taught.
And in an astounding paragraph I read in Professor Brian Cox’s new book, Cox states that every electron in the Universe knows about the state of every other electron. There is an intimacy between the particles that make up our universe that extends across the entire Universe.
If I could tweak the energy of an electron in this molecule of oxygen I’m holding (!) an electron on the other side of the universe would know about it and maybe even change its energy level accordingly.
And you’re telling me that the claims of my faith are weird!
If science is teaching us anything just now - and it is - it’s teaching us how little we really know, and how much more there is to learn.
The best scientists, and the best believers recognise that, and cultivate humility and an open mind.
As the apostle Paul once said – “The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know!”
If we can’t get our head around what’s going on in this staggering universe, what chance have we of understanding the maker of the universe?
“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
We can look, and measure, and theorise, and wonder and learn, but we will never fathom. In the end, our study of the universe won’t answer the God question conclusively either way.
So perhaps it’s more constructive if we begin by looking at ourselves.
“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer, meaning of course, all humankind.
And what he’s saying is that there’s something within us that harbours an echo of eternity. And every now again we pick up the strains of that sound in our experience of living.
I was present at the births of two of my three children. 66.6% That’s a good pass in anyone’s book!
And being there was an immense privilege. Somehow in the middle of the incredible physicality of what was going on, there was something deeply spiritual going on too. This was a new wee life coming into the world. It was utterly amazing.
And I remember a few weeks after Ross was born, going in to the bedroom to check that he was ok, and he and I just stared at one another for ages, and ages without making a sound. And it was almost like I was looking through a window into that wee man’s soul. Another profoundly spiritual moment.
And you have your equivalents of those stories. You’ve had moments like that too; moments when the distance between heaven and earth feels paper thin and you’re caught up into wonderment.
Maybe you’ve been out for a day’s walking, or in some special place that you love, and the stillness and vastness of the landscape’s brought a deep sense of calm to your heart and mind.
Maybe you’ve negotiated an hour or two to yourself, and as you do what you love doing in those times, you feel like you’re coming back to yourself in the middle of all the different tensions that bear down upon your life.
Maybe you’ve sat under the stars, or turned the tractor home as the sun sets, and as you drink in the glory of creation you feel a pull on some inner part of you that you know is there, but you’re hardly aware of most of the time.
Maybe you’ve sat with someone as they’ve passed away, and you’ve been keenly aware of another reality beyond the dimensions of this earthly life.
“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes.
I believe that these moments, these little cameos, are us sensing eternity within our hearts. We’re not made solely for this world. We were made for something more. And within each of us there’s a yearning for that “something” that we can’t even begin to name.
So when we look at ourselves under the microscope, what do we find? Well, we find a shared experience of moments of wonder that make us feel that there’s more to life than we yet know.
But what do we do with those experiences? Where do they lead us?
Well for some, they lead nowhere. They come and they go and we return to everyday life without pausing to think about what they mean.
And I guess that’s where many people in our parish are at. Some are too busy to stop and think about life for very long. Others just don’t want to, because they’re scared of what they might find. And so they welcome any distraction that stops them taking a deep look inside themselves.
CS Lewis describes that sort of person beautifully in his book “The Screwtape Letters”. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s in the form of a series of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, advising him how to go about the business of tempting and leading astray his ‘patient’ – the human being he’s responsible for. This is Screwtape describing an incident where he made distraction work in his favour:
I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool.
I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.
We’re so easily distracted away from the things that really matter. Who knows? It might even be happening today at this very moment!
So some folk drown out the inklings of eternity in their hearts with other things.
But others follow those inklings, but to the wrong destination. They feel the impulse to worship and to wonder, but they end up worshipping the wrong things.
As the apostle Paul wandered round Athens he saw an altar with the inscription “To an Unknown God”. And there’s a real pathos in those words that speaks into our times.
We were made to worship, but we’ve forgotten who it is we’re supposed to be worshipping!
And so people end up worshipping themselves, or money, or celebrity, or a god of their own construction (the old word for that, of course, is idolatry).
We can’t evade that sense of ‘eternity’ that God has placed in our hearts, but we don’t know how on earth to find the God who put it there.
And the answer I’m going to leave you with this morning, is the same one Paul gave to the Athenians 2000 years ago. The same one we celebrate each year in the Season of Advent.
You don’t have to go searching for God. He’s already come looking for you.
In Jesus - who was more than a good man or a prophet or a teacher, but God in human form
The unnameable God has been named.
The invisible God has been seen.
The unknowable God, high over all, has come among us in flesh and blood.
You want to see God, to know what he’s like? Then take a look at the life and person of Jesus Christ. He’s the closest we get to seeing God this side of eternity.
“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men”.
An echo of eternity still resonates within your heart and within mine.
How are you going to respond to it today?
Amen and thanks be to God for the4 promise and the challenge of his word.
So I was really excited a week past on Friday when Bill Bailey came to the Exhibition Centre. Not only is he a good comic, he’s a really good musician as well. and in fairness to the man, we weren’t disappointed. It was a good show.
But there were a couple of sections that I found pretty uncomfortable, especially one where he was looking at different paintings of the encounter between the resurrected Jesus and doubting Thomas.
If you know that story, you’ll remember that Thomas refused to believe until he saw Christ with his own eyes and put his fingers into the wounds from his crucifixion.
And although the humour was pretty gentle, it’s part of a growing trend among many of the comedians I like to listen to – God bashing is in.
Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry and many others are all at it.
It feels a bit like the school bullies Dawkins, Hitchens and Pullman have done their bit, and now some of the smaller boys are emerging from their shadow to offer a few well-placed kicks in the direction of the Almighty.
Who can take it, of course. No Fatwas in Christianity, though some might welcome that.
But it’s just another instance of where our culture seems to be heading.
I had to switch off radio 5 last week because the comedian Richard Herring was on talking about his new book called Christ on a Bike in which he hopes to earn a few bob by holding the Ten Commandments up for ridicule. I couldn’t listen to more than 5 minutes of it because it was so badly informed and so darned smug!
Of course, he can ridicule all he likes – but I’m pretty sure if Richard came out of the BBC studios to find his car nicked, or came home to find his girlfriend murdered or in bed with his best friend, the relevance of the Ten Commandments might strike him with new force.
But God-bashing sells just now, and so the bandwagon continues to rumble on.
And what gets me about it is that the comedians, and even some of the intellectual heavyweights, speak of Christianity and Christians as though we were some monolithic group of mono-browed Luddites who cling to superstition, while at the same time they fall over themselves to adore the discoveries of science.
Religious belief is nonsense for the gullible; science is the light of the world, it seems.
Now as someone with a foot in both camps, that really gets my goat. Perhaps you’ve noticed!
The claims of religion, and it seems to be particularly the Christian religion, are held to be beyond belief. All that miraculous stuff has to be nonsense, they say. It’s just too weird to have any basis in reality.
Ok. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment.
Here are some of the things that science is telling us just now:
Science is telling us that it’s possible for a single particle to be in several places at once.
It’s telling us that space and time aren’t linear, they’re curved.
That the vast majority of matter in the Universe – 83% - is stuff that we know virtually nothing about, called ‘dark matter’. We can’t see it, we’ve never obtained a sample of it. We only know it’s there because of the effect it has on things we can see and measure.
Although we’re used to thinking in terms of four dimensions, the latest physics - string theory - is suggesting that in order to understand reality we may need to think in anything up to 11 dimensions.
It’s telling us that it may be possible to travel faster than the speed of light and go back in time – contrary to what Einstein taught.
And in an astounding paragraph I read in Professor Brian Cox’s new book, Cox states that every electron in the Universe knows about the state of every other electron. There is an intimacy between the particles that make up our universe that extends across the entire Universe.
If I could tweak the energy of an electron in this molecule of oxygen I’m holding (!) an electron on the other side of the universe would know about it and maybe even change its energy level accordingly.
And you’re telling me that the claims of my faith are weird!
If science is teaching us anything just now - and it is - it’s teaching us how little we really know, and how much more there is to learn.
The best scientists, and the best believers recognise that, and cultivate humility and an open mind.
As the apostle Paul once said – “The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know!”
If we can’t get our head around what’s going on in this staggering universe, what chance have we of understanding the maker of the universe?
“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
We can look, and measure, and theorise, and wonder and learn, but we will never fathom. In the end, our study of the universe won’t answer the God question conclusively either way.
So perhaps it’s more constructive if we begin by looking at ourselves.
“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer, meaning of course, all humankind.
And what he’s saying is that there’s something within us that harbours an echo of eternity. And every now again we pick up the strains of that sound in our experience of living.
I was present at the births of two of my three children. 66.6% That’s a good pass in anyone’s book!
And being there was an immense privilege. Somehow in the middle of the incredible physicality of what was going on, there was something deeply spiritual going on too. This was a new wee life coming into the world. It was utterly amazing.
And I remember a few weeks after Ross was born, going in to the bedroom to check that he was ok, and he and I just stared at one another for ages, and ages without making a sound. And it was almost like I was looking through a window into that wee man’s soul. Another profoundly spiritual moment.
And you have your equivalents of those stories. You’ve had moments like that too; moments when the distance between heaven and earth feels paper thin and you’re caught up into wonderment.
Maybe you’ve been out for a day’s walking, or in some special place that you love, and the stillness and vastness of the landscape’s brought a deep sense of calm to your heart and mind.
Maybe you’ve negotiated an hour or two to yourself, and as you do what you love doing in those times, you feel like you’re coming back to yourself in the middle of all the different tensions that bear down upon your life.
Maybe you’ve sat under the stars, or turned the tractor home as the sun sets, and as you drink in the glory of creation you feel a pull on some inner part of you that you know is there, but you’re hardly aware of most of the time.
Maybe you’ve sat with someone as they’ve passed away, and you’ve been keenly aware of another reality beyond the dimensions of this earthly life.
“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes.
I believe that these moments, these little cameos, are us sensing eternity within our hearts. We’re not made solely for this world. We were made for something more. And within each of us there’s a yearning for that “something” that we can’t even begin to name.
So when we look at ourselves under the microscope, what do we find? Well, we find a shared experience of moments of wonder that make us feel that there’s more to life than we yet know.
But what do we do with those experiences? Where do they lead us?
Well for some, they lead nowhere. They come and they go and we return to everyday life without pausing to think about what they mean.
And I guess that’s where many people in our parish are at. Some are too busy to stop and think about life for very long. Others just don’t want to, because they’re scared of what they might find. And so they welcome any distraction that stops them taking a deep look inside themselves.
CS Lewis describes that sort of person beautifully in his book “The Screwtape Letters”. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s in the form of a series of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, advising him how to go about the business of tempting and leading astray his ‘patient’ – the human being he’s responsible for. This is Screwtape describing an incident where he made distraction work in his favour:
I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool.
I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.
We’re so easily distracted away from the things that really matter. Who knows? It might even be happening today at this very moment!
So some folk drown out the inklings of eternity in their hearts with other things.
But others follow those inklings, but to the wrong destination. They feel the impulse to worship and to wonder, but they end up worshipping the wrong things.
As the apostle Paul wandered round Athens he saw an altar with the inscription “To an Unknown God”. And there’s a real pathos in those words that speaks into our times.
We were made to worship, but we’ve forgotten who it is we’re supposed to be worshipping!
And so people end up worshipping themselves, or money, or celebrity, or a god of their own construction (the old word for that, of course, is idolatry).
We can’t evade that sense of ‘eternity’ that God has placed in our hearts, but we don’t know how on earth to find the God who put it there.
And the answer I’m going to leave you with this morning, is the same one Paul gave to the Athenians 2000 years ago. The same one we celebrate each year in the Season of Advent.
You don’t have to go searching for God. He’s already come looking for you.
In Jesus - who was more than a good man or a prophet or a teacher, but God in human form
The unnameable God has been named.
The invisible God has been seen.
The unknowable God, high over all, has come among us in flesh and blood.
You want to see God, to know what he’s like? Then take a look at the life and person of Jesus Christ. He’s the closest we get to seeing God this side of eternity.
“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men”.
An echo of eternity still resonates within your heart and within mine.
How are you going to respond to it today?
Amen and thanks be to God for the4 promise and the challenge of his word.
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Psalm 139: There's Knowing and there's Knowing
A Remembrance Sunday Sermon.
This morning we’ve heard the story of how the Grave of the Unknown Warrior came to be, and a poignant and moving story it is.
We’ll never know who’s buried there in Westminster Abbey, and that, of course, is exactly the point. It could be any of the men who were lost in the battles of the First World War, and that’s what makes this particular grave such a powerful symbol for so many people.
In treating this one man with such honour, that honour was conferred on every other soldier who fell in battle and was never laid to rest in a marked grave that could be visited or tended. Tens of thousands of families who were left in limbo, with no place to mourn, now had somewhere as a focal point for their remembrance, and the comfort that their loved one was thought fit to rest among kings.
It was as noble a gesture as could be managed, I think.
But a gesture is all that it could ever be. The reality it could never erase was the unimaginable carnage of those fields in France where a whole generation was lost in war.
I’d heard of the Grave of the Unknown Warrior before today but didn’t know the story behind it, and the more I read the more I found myself reflecting on that word ‘unknown’.
In one sense, of course, the soldier was exactly that. Unknown. We don’t know his identity. But in another sense, he is known, and known completely.
Around the Warrior’s tomb are four Biblical quotations:
The first – John’s gospel - speaks about sacrifice: GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN THIS: (that he lay down his life for his friends)
The second – 1st Corinthians - speaks about hope we can have in the face of death – IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE. One of the claims of the Christian story is that Christ’s work will overcome even death in the end.
The other two speak about knowing:
Paul – 2nd Corinthians: UNKNOWN AND YET WELL KNOWN, DYING AND BEHOLD WE LIVE.
2nd Timothy: THE LORD KNOWETH THEM THAT ARE HIS.
The consistent witness of the Bible is that God knows each one of us better than we know ourselves.
Psalm 139 conveys that truth with beauty and conviction.
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
We are known.
And the apostle Paul emphasises that in those words we heard right at the beginning of our service.
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
No matter where we are in the world’s pecking order. No matter if our unformed eyes never get to see the light of day beyond the womb. No matter if we die in a foreign field with no headstone to honour our sacrifice.
We are known., valued, understood, remembered and loved by God.
There are no nameless people in the eyes of our maker.
The story of the man who lies beneath that slab of marble in Westminster Abbey is no mystery to God. And nor are the stories of the hundreds of thousands of men who could equally well have occupied that space. And nor are the stories of the people they left behind; and nor are your stories, or mine.
We are all of us, however we live, however we die, known by God.
And that might be enough for us to hear today on this Remembrance Sunday. And I would love to leave it there.
But conscience doesn’t allow me to, because as I reflected on this I realised that the Bible has more to say on this, and what it says, we may not wish to hear.
What it has to say is that there is knowing and then there is knowing.
Let me illustrate with a story from Billy Connolly’s childhood.
Connolly tells a story about one Friday evening when his neighbour, Mr Cumberland, came home from his work at the Shipyard. Now I think Mr Cumberland had already had a refreshment or two on the way home, and he was fully intending to go back out to the pub after he’d delivered his pay packet had his dinner.
But Mrs Cumberland was having none of it. She’d been inside with ‘they weans’ – all day and if he wanted to go out for a drink he would need to get ‘they weans’ bathed and off to bed before he even thought about it.
So Mr Cumberland, rather the worse for wear, set off round the streets to round up his ten children and get them ready for bed. The only problem was he missed out two of his own kids and rounded up two Connolly’s by mistake – Billy and his sister. And before they knew what was happening they were scrubbed, changed and tucked up in bed with the Cumberlands!
Meanwhile, two wee Cumberlands were wandering the streets wondering where on earth the rest of their clan had gone!
There is knowing and there is knowing.
There’s a knowing which is about knowledge and there’s a knowing which is about intimacy and relationship.
Mr Cumberland knew he had ten children. He got that fact correct. But with a few drinks in him, he didn’t know which ten they were!
Couldn’t fault him on the facts. Did a bit less well on the relationship side of things!
There’s a knowing which is about intimacy.
Anyone who’s ever dipped into the King James version of the Bible will be familiar with phrases like “And Adam knew Eve, and they conceived a son”. “And Joseph took Mary home to be his wife, but he knew her not until she had brought forth her firstborn son. And he called his name Jesus”.
Knowing is about intimacy – mutuality.
Sometimes, years into a marriage, a man and a woman can find themselves on rocky ground, and one of the things that’s often said in those times is “I just don’t know you anymore”. And what’s meant is that the intimacy’s gone.
And we need to realise that when the Bible speaks about our knowing God, and being known by God, it’s not mere knowledge we’re speaking about. It’s talking about intimacy – a two-way relationship that’s right at the heart of things. This is what God wants for all his children.
In a sobering passage at the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks about the day of judgment when the peoples of the world will be gathered before God to give an account of themselves. And it’s a very interesting read – not least because some with little or no expectation are welcomed into the kingdom. while some others, who are a little too sure of themselves, come a cropper.
And the words God says to those who are sent away from his presence are haunting. He says “I never knew you. I never knew you.”
In once sense, we are all known by God. No-one is nameless. No-one is forgotten or unknown. But we’re also called to a deeper knowing; a two-way relationship between the creator and the created, and it’s the work of Jesus that makes that kind of a relationship possible.
We’ve been thinking about how the Unknown Warrior became a representative of all those men who fell and were lost in battle.
One of the ways the Bible speaks about Jesus is as a representative. A representative of all humanity. We’re told that on the cross he took the blame for all our wrongdoing, so we could know peace with God, sinners though we are, if we trust in him.
And just as the honour that was afforded the Unknown Soldier spilled over to bring glory to his fallen comrades, so those who trust in Christ get to share in the honour that belongs to him, as the only begotten son of God.
There’s a story told about a young man who desperately wanted to see President Lincoln about an urgent matter, and he travelled all the way to the White House to get an audience with him.
But the man had no credentials, so the guards on the door refused him entry to the building.
As he sat disconsolately on the front steps of the White House, a young lad came running round the corner, and noticing he was upset, he sat down beside him and asked him what was wrong. The young man poured out his story and the wee boy drank it all in.
When he’d finished talking, the boy said – “Come with me, I think maybe I can help you”. The boy took him by the hand, led him into the White House through another entrance, and led him all the way to a grand oak door which he knocked in what sounded like a secret code.
He pushed the door open, and there behind the desk sat Abraham Lincoln. “Hello Tad – what can I do for you?” he said.
“Well, Father, I met this man outside and he’s desperate to talk to you” said the wee boy. And before long, the young man had his chance to talk with the President.
He’d known Lincoln by name and reputation. But now he had a different kind of knowing. The beginnings of an intimacy in relationship, made possible because of what the son had done.
There’s knowing, and then there’s knowing.
The good news of the gospel today is that none of us are strangers to God. We’re all known.
But the challenge of the gospel is whether we’re prepared to take things further and pursue the intimacy with God that Jesus made possible.
As ever, he leaves the choice in our hands.
Amen, and thanks be to God for the promises and the challenges of his word.
This morning we’ve heard the story of how the Grave of the Unknown Warrior came to be, and a poignant and moving story it is.
We’ll never know who’s buried there in Westminster Abbey, and that, of course, is exactly the point. It could be any of the men who were lost in the battles of the First World War, and that’s what makes this particular grave such a powerful symbol for so many people.
In treating this one man with such honour, that honour was conferred on every other soldier who fell in battle and was never laid to rest in a marked grave that could be visited or tended. Tens of thousands of families who were left in limbo, with no place to mourn, now had somewhere as a focal point for their remembrance, and the comfort that their loved one was thought fit to rest among kings.
It was as noble a gesture as could be managed, I think.
But a gesture is all that it could ever be. The reality it could never erase was the unimaginable carnage of those fields in France where a whole generation was lost in war.
I’d heard of the Grave of the Unknown Warrior before today but didn’t know the story behind it, and the more I read the more I found myself reflecting on that word ‘unknown’.
In one sense, of course, the soldier was exactly that. Unknown. We don’t know his identity. But in another sense, he is known, and known completely.
Around the Warrior’s tomb are four Biblical quotations:
The first – John’s gospel - speaks about sacrifice: GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN THIS: (that he lay down his life for his friends)
The second – 1st Corinthians - speaks about hope we can have in the face of death – IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE. One of the claims of the Christian story is that Christ’s work will overcome even death in the end.
The other two speak about knowing:
Paul – 2nd Corinthians: UNKNOWN AND YET WELL KNOWN, DYING AND BEHOLD WE LIVE.
2nd Timothy: THE LORD KNOWETH THEM THAT ARE HIS.
The consistent witness of the Bible is that God knows each one of us better than we know ourselves.
Psalm 139 conveys that truth with beauty and conviction.
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
We are known.
And the apostle Paul emphasises that in those words we heard right at the beginning of our service.
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
No matter where we are in the world’s pecking order. No matter if our unformed eyes never get to see the light of day beyond the womb. No matter if we die in a foreign field with no headstone to honour our sacrifice.
We are known., valued, understood, remembered and loved by God.
There are no nameless people in the eyes of our maker.
The story of the man who lies beneath that slab of marble in Westminster Abbey is no mystery to God. And nor are the stories of the hundreds of thousands of men who could equally well have occupied that space. And nor are the stories of the people they left behind; and nor are your stories, or mine.
We are all of us, however we live, however we die, known by God.
And that might be enough for us to hear today on this Remembrance Sunday. And I would love to leave it there.
But conscience doesn’t allow me to, because as I reflected on this I realised that the Bible has more to say on this, and what it says, we may not wish to hear.
What it has to say is that there is knowing and then there is knowing.
Let me illustrate with a story from Billy Connolly’s childhood.
Connolly tells a story about one Friday evening when his neighbour, Mr Cumberland, came home from his work at the Shipyard. Now I think Mr Cumberland had already had a refreshment or two on the way home, and he was fully intending to go back out to the pub after he’d delivered his pay packet had his dinner.
But Mrs Cumberland was having none of it. She’d been inside with ‘they weans’ – all day and if he wanted to go out for a drink he would need to get ‘they weans’ bathed and off to bed before he even thought about it.
So Mr Cumberland, rather the worse for wear, set off round the streets to round up his ten children and get them ready for bed. The only problem was he missed out two of his own kids and rounded up two Connolly’s by mistake – Billy and his sister. And before they knew what was happening they were scrubbed, changed and tucked up in bed with the Cumberlands!
Meanwhile, two wee Cumberlands were wandering the streets wondering where on earth the rest of their clan had gone!
There is knowing and there is knowing.
There’s a knowing which is about knowledge and there’s a knowing which is about intimacy and relationship.
Mr Cumberland knew he had ten children. He got that fact correct. But with a few drinks in him, he didn’t know which ten they were!
Couldn’t fault him on the facts. Did a bit less well on the relationship side of things!
There’s a knowing which is about intimacy.
Anyone who’s ever dipped into the King James version of the Bible will be familiar with phrases like “And Adam knew Eve, and they conceived a son”. “And Joseph took Mary home to be his wife, but he knew her not until she had brought forth her firstborn son. And he called his name Jesus”.
Knowing is about intimacy – mutuality.
Sometimes, years into a marriage, a man and a woman can find themselves on rocky ground, and one of the things that’s often said in those times is “I just don’t know you anymore”. And what’s meant is that the intimacy’s gone.
And we need to realise that when the Bible speaks about our knowing God, and being known by God, it’s not mere knowledge we’re speaking about. It’s talking about intimacy – a two-way relationship that’s right at the heart of things. This is what God wants for all his children.
In a sobering passage at the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks about the day of judgment when the peoples of the world will be gathered before God to give an account of themselves. And it’s a very interesting read – not least because some with little or no expectation are welcomed into the kingdom. while some others, who are a little too sure of themselves, come a cropper.
And the words God says to those who are sent away from his presence are haunting. He says “I never knew you. I never knew you.”
In once sense, we are all known by God. No-one is nameless. No-one is forgotten or unknown. But we’re also called to a deeper knowing; a two-way relationship between the creator and the created, and it’s the work of Jesus that makes that kind of a relationship possible.
We’ve been thinking about how the Unknown Warrior became a representative of all those men who fell and were lost in battle.
One of the ways the Bible speaks about Jesus is as a representative. A representative of all humanity. We’re told that on the cross he took the blame for all our wrongdoing, so we could know peace with God, sinners though we are, if we trust in him.
And just as the honour that was afforded the Unknown Soldier spilled over to bring glory to his fallen comrades, so those who trust in Christ get to share in the honour that belongs to him, as the only begotten son of God.
There’s a story told about a young man who desperately wanted to see President Lincoln about an urgent matter, and he travelled all the way to the White House to get an audience with him.
But the man had no credentials, so the guards on the door refused him entry to the building.
As he sat disconsolately on the front steps of the White House, a young lad came running round the corner, and noticing he was upset, he sat down beside him and asked him what was wrong. The young man poured out his story and the wee boy drank it all in.
When he’d finished talking, the boy said – “Come with me, I think maybe I can help you”. The boy took him by the hand, led him into the White House through another entrance, and led him all the way to a grand oak door which he knocked in what sounded like a secret code.
He pushed the door open, and there behind the desk sat Abraham Lincoln. “Hello Tad – what can I do for you?” he said.
“Well, Father, I met this man outside and he’s desperate to talk to you” said the wee boy. And before long, the young man had his chance to talk with the President.
He’d known Lincoln by name and reputation. But now he had a different kind of knowing. The beginnings of an intimacy in relationship, made possible because of what the son had done.
There’s knowing, and then there’s knowing.
The good news of the gospel today is that none of us are strangers to God. We’re all known.
But the challenge of the gospel is whether we’re prepared to take things further and pursue the intimacy with God that Jesus made possible.
As ever, he leaves the choice in our hands.
Amen, and thanks be to God for the promises and the challenges of his word.
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Psalm 134. Blessing
Business trips aside, there’s often something wonderful about coming to the end of a long journey.
If you’re going somewhere new, there’s the excitement of your first glimpse of a different country as you make your way from the airport or the harbour to your destination. Drinking in the sights and smells of a strange land.
If you’re visiting family, there’s that moment when you spot one another as you push your laden trolley through customs and out into the waiting area, and find yourselves enveloped in hugs and smiles.
And even for the weary traveller returning home – there’s the blessing of the familiar to be welcomed. The comfy chair; your own bed. The arms of your loved ones.
Today’s Psalm marks the end of a long, punctuated journey up to Jerusalem that we began over two years ago. Psalm 120 got us moving; the sheer struggles of life making us yearn for a better world, and getting our pilgrim feet on the road of discipleship.
And as we’ve travelled with these Psalms, we’ve found them challenging us and encouraging us at every turn, always and everywhere reminding us to keep God at the centre of all our living.
But today, with Psalm 134, we’ve arrived. We’re in the place of blessing. We’re at our journey’s end.
Anyone who’s ever been abroad to a warmer country knows that in the evening, the place seems to come alive as the temperature drops a little and darkness falls. Whole families come out to amble through the streets, in search of food, or a bargain, or just a good conversation.
I imagine Jerusalem at night, with crowds of folk walking through the streets, but if we could watch them from above, we’d see how their steps are leading them all to the same place. They’re winding their way up to the Temple, which is blazing with light, as folk gather to worship. The place is thronging with people, bringing their sacrifices and their thanks to God.
“Come, praise the Lord, all his servants, all who serve in his Temple at night” says the Psalmist. “Raise your hands in prayer in the Temple and praise the Lord”.
And that’s exactly what they do. A sea of voices swells. A forest of hands is raised in prayer. It must have been powerfully moving to have been a part of it.
Our journey through the Psalms of Ascent is ending. We started out in discontent and restlessness, but we end in the joyful blessing of God. And it’s the business of blessing I want us to think about this morning.
I have to confess, I was pleased to discover that the phrase ‘Praise the Lord’ in verses 1 and 2 is better translated ‘Bless the Lord’. For me, the phrase "Praise the Lord" conjures up images of the worst kind of tele-evangelist, and I tend to think of 'praise' as something you reserve for children or well-behaved pets!
But I like blessing the Lord, or thanking the Lord. I can get my head around that!
But here’s a question – when the Psalmist says “Bless the Lord, all his servants. Raise your hands in prayer in the temple and bless the Lord” is that an invitation, or a command? It could be both. And in fact, it probably is both.
As an invitation, everyone is encouraged to join in, regardless of how they happen to be feeling.
“Did you have a fight with your spouse on the way? That’s all right. You’re here now. Bless God. Did you quarrel with your neighbour while making the trip? Forget it. You’re here now. Bless God. Did you lose touch with your family while you were coming in and aren’t sure where they are now? Put that aside for the moment. They have their own pilgrimage to make. You are here. Bless God. Are you ashamed of the feelings you had while travelling? The grumbling you indulged in? the resentment you harboured? Well, it wasn’t bad enough to keep you from arriving, and now that you’re here – Bless God. Are you embarrassed at the number of times you gave up and had to have someone pick you up and carry you along? It doesn’t matter. You’re here. Bless God”.
It’s an invitation that’s open to all, regardless. But at the same time, it’s also a command.
Having arrived at the place of worship, will we now sit around and tell stories about the trip? Having gotten to the big city will we spend our time as tourists, visiting the bazaars, window shopping and trading? Having gotten Jerusalem checked off our list of things to do, will we immediately begin looking for another challenge, another holy place to visit? Will the Temple be a place to socialise or receive congratulations from others on our achievement? A place to share gossip and trade stories, a place to make business contacts that will improve our prospects back home? That’s not why you made the trip: Bless God. You are here because God blessed you. Now you bless God.
Bless God. It’s an invitation, but it’s also a command. Why do we need the command? Isn’t the invitation enough?
Well, there may be times for you and me when blessing God comes naturally. We’ll be keenly aware of the ways in which we’ve been blessed, and we’ll want to give God thanks for what he’s done for us and through us.
But it’s amazing how quickly and superficially that can change. It can change with our digestion, or with a bad day at work, or with the weather. Is it just me, or is it easier to feel thankful on a sunny day than on a wet day? That’s how fickle we are!
My inclination to bless God ebbs and flows like the tide, depending on the circumstances of my life. But is God any less deserving of thanks when I happen to be at a low ebb? I don’t think so!
So there are times, when against my inclination, I have to stir myself to thankfulness. Just as there are mornings when an athlete has to stir herself to get out of bed and do the training. We can’t let our feelings run the show, otherwise we won’t make progress. And some authors reckon that’s why the Psalmist exhorts his listeners to raise their hands in prayer. We’re psycho-somatic beings. What we do with our bodies affects how we think and feel.
If you’re not in the mood for worship, but you knuckle down to it anyway, it’s not long before you find yourself feeling more involved and engaged. If you drag yourself out of bed for that run in the morning, it’s not long before your mind gets over its reluctance and starts enjoying the experience.
And that word enjoyment is so important for us as we draw this series to a close.
Church life, institutional church life anyway, is filled with so many duties and responsibilities we can end up suffering from what Gerry Hughes calls ‘a hardening of the oughteries’. I ought to do this. I ought to do that.
But before church is about any of that, it’s about you and me coming into relationship with the living God, in whom we live and move and have our being. He is there to be known – that’s the gospel we proclaim.
Our 'chief end', according to the Reformers, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
One commentator puts it this way:
Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Psalms of the Ascent have shown us some of them. But it is extremely important to know the one thing that overrides everything else. The main thing is not work for the Lord; it’s not suffering for the Lord; it’s not witnessing to the Lord; it’s not teaching Sunday School for the Lord; it’s not being responsible in the community for the sake of the Lord; it’s not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbour; not observing the Golden Rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, it is to “Bless God”.
If we bless God with our time and our attention, our love and our obedience, we in turn will find a blessing. We’ll know more of what Jesus calls life in all its fullness. This is how things seem to work, in the economy of God. The one who gives, receives. The one who blesses, is blessed.
I loved anointing the children last week during our communion service. As they came up I called them each by name, and in a wee reminder of their baptism, I said “the Lord bless you and keep you” as I made a little cross on the back of their hands with that fragrant oil.
When our Isla came up she had that look on her wee face that I know she’ll grow out of in a few years time. It was that look of love and adoration a child wears in those glorious years when she’s innocent enough to think her daddy really is the best daddy in the world. I’m determined to enjoy it while it lasts.
And I was so in the moment, taking her by the hand, and anointing her with the oil, that I didn’t properly notice that as I was blessing her, she was busy kissing me on the arm in return. I only found it out later when a couple of folk said how sweet it was that she’d done that.
What a lovely reciprocity.
Keep that image with you as we leave the Psalms today.
The Father, reaching out in blessing. The child responding in gratitude and love.
For this we were made.
And for this, the up-and-down journey of discipleship is worth every step of the way.
(Quotations in purple from "A Long Obedience In The Same Direction" by Eugene Peterson)
If you’re going somewhere new, there’s the excitement of your first glimpse of a different country as you make your way from the airport or the harbour to your destination. Drinking in the sights and smells of a strange land.
If you’re visiting family, there’s that moment when you spot one another as you push your laden trolley through customs and out into the waiting area, and find yourselves enveloped in hugs and smiles.
And even for the weary traveller returning home – there’s the blessing of the familiar to be welcomed. The comfy chair; your own bed. The arms of your loved ones.
Today’s Psalm marks the end of a long, punctuated journey up to Jerusalem that we began over two years ago. Psalm 120 got us moving; the sheer struggles of life making us yearn for a better world, and getting our pilgrim feet on the road of discipleship.
And as we’ve travelled with these Psalms, we’ve found them challenging us and encouraging us at every turn, always and everywhere reminding us to keep God at the centre of all our living.
But today, with Psalm 134, we’ve arrived. We’re in the place of blessing. We’re at our journey’s end.
Anyone who’s ever been abroad to a warmer country knows that in the evening, the place seems to come alive as the temperature drops a little and darkness falls. Whole families come out to amble through the streets, in search of food, or a bargain, or just a good conversation.
I imagine Jerusalem at night, with crowds of folk walking through the streets, but if we could watch them from above, we’d see how their steps are leading them all to the same place. They’re winding their way up to the Temple, which is blazing with light, as folk gather to worship. The place is thronging with people, bringing their sacrifices and their thanks to God.
“Come, praise the Lord, all his servants, all who serve in his Temple at night” says the Psalmist. “Raise your hands in prayer in the Temple and praise the Lord”.
And that’s exactly what they do. A sea of voices swells. A forest of hands is raised in prayer. It must have been powerfully moving to have been a part of it.
Our journey through the Psalms of Ascent is ending. We started out in discontent and restlessness, but we end in the joyful blessing of God. And it’s the business of blessing I want us to think about this morning.
I have to confess, I was pleased to discover that the phrase ‘Praise the Lord’ in verses 1 and 2 is better translated ‘Bless the Lord’. For me, the phrase "Praise the Lord" conjures up images of the worst kind of tele-evangelist, and I tend to think of 'praise' as something you reserve for children or well-behaved pets!
But I like blessing the Lord, or thanking the Lord. I can get my head around that!
But here’s a question – when the Psalmist says “Bless the Lord, all his servants. Raise your hands in prayer in the temple and bless the Lord” is that an invitation, or a command? It could be both. And in fact, it probably is both.
As an invitation, everyone is encouraged to join in, regardless of how they happen to be feeling.
“Did you have a fight with your spouse on the way? That’s all right. You’re here now. Bless God. Did you quarrel with your neighbour while making the trip? Forget it. You’re here now. Bless God. Did you lose touch with your family while you were coming in and aren’t sure where they are now? Put that aside for the moment. They have their own pilgrimage to make. You are here. Bless God. Are you ashamed of the feelings you had while travelling? The grumbling you indulged in? the resentment you harboured? Well, it wasn’t bad enough to keep you from arriving, and now that you’re here – Bless God. Are you embarrassed at the number of times you gave up and had to have someone pick you up and carry you along? It doesn’t matter. You’re here. Bless God”.
It’s an invitation that’s open to all, regardless. But at the same time, it’s also a command.
Having arrived at the place of worship, will we now sit around and tell stories about the trip? Having gotten to the big city will we spend our time as tourists, visiting the bazaars, window shopping and trading? Having gotten Jerusalem checked off our list of things to do, will we immediately begin looking for another challenge, another holy place to visit? Will the Temple be a place to socialise or receive congratulations from others on our achievement? A place to share gossip and trade stories, a place to make business contacts that will improve our prospects back home? That’s not why you made the trip: Bless God. You are here because God blessed you. Now you bless God.
Bless God. It’s an invitation, but it’s also a command. Why do we need the command? Isn’t the invitation enough?
Well, there may be times for you and me when blessing God comes naturally. We’ll be keenly aware of the ways in which we’ve been blessed, and we’ll want to give God thanks for what he’s done for us and through us.
But it’s amazing how quickly and superficially that can change. It can change with our digestion, or with a bad day at work, or with the weather. Is it just me, or is it easier to feel thankful on a sunny day than on a wet day? That’s how fickle we are!
My inclination to bless God ebbs and flows like the tide, depending on the circumstances of my life. But is God any less deserving of thanks when I happen to be at a low ebb? I don’t think so!
So there are times, when against my inclination, I have to stir myself to thankfulness. Just as there are mornings when an athlete has to stir herself to get out of bed and do the training. We can’t let our feelings run the show, otherwise we won’t make progress. And some authors reckon that’s why the Psalmist exhorts his listeners to raise their hands in prayer. We’re psycho-somatic beings. What we do with our bodies affects how we think and feel.
If you’re not in the mood for worship, but you knuckle down to it anyway, it’s not long before you find yourself feeling more involved and engaged. If you drag yourself out of bed for that run in the morning, it’s not long before your mind gets over its reluctance and starts enjoying the experience.
And that word enjoyment is so important for us as we draw this series to a close.
Church life, institutional church life anyway, is filled with so many duties and responsibilities we can end up suffering from what Gerry Hughes calls ‘a hardening of the oughteries’. I ought to do this. I ought to do that.
But before church is about any of that, it’s about you and me coming into relationship with the living God, in whom we live and move and have our being. He is there to be known – that’s the gospel we proclaim.
Our 'chief end', according to the Reformers, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
One commentator puts it this way:
Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Psalms of the Ascent have shown us some of them. But it is extremely important to know the one thing that overrides everything else. The main thing is not work for the Lord; it’s not suffering for the Lord; it’s not witnessing to the Lord; it’s not teaching Sunday School for the Lord; it’s not being responsible in the community for the sake of the Lord; it’s not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbour; not observing the Golden Rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, it is to “Bless God”.
If we bless God with our time and our attention, our love and our obedience, we in turn will find a blessing. We’ll know more of what Jesus calls life in all its fullness. This is how things seem to work, in the economy of God. The one who gives, receives. The one who blesses, is blessed.
I loved anointing the children last week during our communion service. As they came up I called them each by name, and in a wee reminder of their baptism, I said “the Lord bless you and keep you” as I made a little cross on the back of their hands with that fragrant oil.
When our Isla came up she had that look on her wee face that I know she’ll grow out of in a few years time. It was that look of love and adoration a child wears in those glorious years when she’s innocent enough to think her daddy really is the best daddy in the world. I’m determined to enjoy it while it lasts.
And I was so in the moment, taking her by the hand, and anointing her with the oil, that I didn’t properly notice that as I was blessing her, she was busy kissing me on the arm in return. I only found it out later when a couple of folk said how sweet it was that she’d done that.
What a lovely reciprocity.
Keep that image with you as we leave the Psalms today.
The Father, reaching out in blessing. The child responding in gratitude and love.
For this we were made.
And for this, the up-and-down journey of discipleship is worth every step of the way.
(Quotations in purple from "A Long Obedience In The Same Direction" by Eugene Peterson)
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Psalm 133. Oil, Water and Unity
"How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity".
I think we can all agree that unity is good and pleasant.
I think we can also agree that it is rare!
If you come from a big family, you may well think that the words 'brothers' and 'unity' don’t belong in the same sentence. Brothers fight. Sisters fight. Sibling rivalry is alive and well in most families. Take a look at the first Biblical account of two brothers living together – Cain and Abel - and you soon discover that it ends in murder.
And much of world history shows that we keep repeating the same mistakes we made in Eden. We struggle with our brothers, we make war on our brothers, we exploit our brothers. Again and again and again.
But fortunately, there is one bastion of hope in all of this. The Church. You never get any disputes or fall outs in the church! In the church, the peace of Christ reigns and people live in perpetual harmony.
Aye right.
There’s a story about a woman who went to visit an institution for the criminally insane and she was shocked to see that there were only 3 guards supervising 100 dangerous inmates.
“Don’t you worry that these guys will band together and overpower you?” she asked one of the guards.
“Don’t worry about that,” the guard smiled. “Lunatics never unite.”
If you know much about Church History, you might conclude that the Church is full of Lunatics. You don’t need to be an Historian to see that the church also has a hard time with unity. The sheer range of denominations and schismatic groups in our part of the world is a vivid testimony to that.
And even within our own little sub-groups, many Christians still fail to get along. In congregations all across the World, people are quarrelling and quibbling. It seems almost impossible for Church folk to learn to live together in unity.
And our only saving grace is that it has ever been thus. We tend to look at the early church through rose coloured lenses and imagine it to have been some kind of utopian community.
But when you actually read the New Testament letters, you discover that nearly every one of them was written in response to difficulties and disputes within the church. There were factions, there were scandals, there were power-struggles. Read the book of Acts and you discover that even the luminaries of the early church, St Paul and St Peter, fell out at times.
Whether inside the church or outside the church, it’s a given that people will often struggle to get on with one another. Charles Schultz put it brilliantly in the words of his Peanuts character Linus:
“I Love Mankind. It’s People I Can’t Stand”.
And the problem with churches is that they’re full of people! People who think differently, want to worship differently, are socially or culturally different. It’s easy to say we love mankind in general. It’s very hard to love people in particular, especially when we differ with them.
But that’s what we’re called to. For the sake of the world, and the Kingdom of God, the church is called to pursue unity.
The difference between the world and the church isn’t that the world has fights and struggles and the church doesn’t, The difference is in how we deal with the fights and struggles when they come along. In the midst of our disputes, we in the church are called to pursue unity. It’s difficult! But how good and pleasant it is, the Psalmist says, when we achieve some measure of it.
Today’s Psalm gives us two word-pictures to show what Unity is like. Verse 2 says
"It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes".
That image is a snapshot of the day when Aaron – Moses brother - was first anointed as High Priest over the new nation of Israel. The oil that was poured over his head would have contained several strong spices: myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, and cassia, all blended together in a base of Olive Oil.
Now I don’t know when you last had your head doused in oil, but put yourself in Aaron’s shoes for a moment. How would he have felt, apart from wet and sticky?
He’s being blessed, isn’t he? Treated with dignity and respect. Something precious and expensive is being poured out on him, not just for his sake, but so the whole community can be ministered to through him. He’s never known anything like this – it’s profoundly moving. His body will carry the aroma from this experience for days if not weeks; his clothes will carry it for longer.
And there’s something delightfully wrong about what’s happening to him! You don’t pour a pint of aromatic oil over someone’s head, and you certainly don’t do it while they’re fully clothed. Think of the dry cleaning issues!
Performing the ceremony in that way says something. It says that grace is profligate; it’s unmerited; it’s determined to bless, and won’t be deterred by convention.
That, says the Psalmist, is a picture of the unity that should mark out the people of God.
How would it be, if in the middle of our disputes, we resolved not to go the way of the world, and instead decided to treat one another with dignity and respect? To pour out the precious, expensive commodities of our time, our listening and our patience on the other, even if we feel them to be undeserving of them.
How would it feel to bless someone in that way? Or to receive that blessing, when all you were expecting was more confrontation or criticism? It would surprise you. It might even change you.
“Aye, but they’re not living that way, God!"
“So what?” says God. "That’s their story, not yours. I’m talking to you right now. Maybe you’re the one I want to lead the way, and take the first step. Maybe it’s your example that will make all the difference."
Paul Negrut, the President of the Romanian Evangelical Alliance tells of a man who spent 17 years in prison under the Communist Regime for being a Christian.
Paul went to visit him one evening and arrived just as the secret police were leaving, and the man’s face was bloody and bruised from the beating they’d just dished out. Paul was furious, but his friend said “We’re not here to complain, Paul. We’re here to praise God. Let’s pray together.” So they knelt and prayed, and though Paul was so angry he was tongue-tied, his friend made up for it.
He prayed for the secret police, for the Communist Party, for those who had beaten him up. He asked God’s forgiveness for them, God’s blessing on them and God’s love to be poured out on their families.” Paul said he had never heard anyone pray for his enemies with such love.
After they’d prayed, his friend told him that the secret police came twice a week to torture him, and every time they came he looked into the eyes of the man who was beating him up and said “Sir, if we see each other before the throne of judgment, and if you are eternally lost, I want you to know that it is not because I hate you. It will be because you have rejected Jesus’ love and my love”.
Some time later, that policeman came back to the house on his own, but this time it wasn’t to dish out a beating. It was to say that he had become a Christian. He’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and after reflecting long and hard on his life he knew he had to make good the wrongs he’d done and seek forgiveness from those whom he’d hurt. He’d come to pray with the man he’d tortured.
A story where costly grace, poured out at great expense, brought unity.
But what of this second image of Unity the Psalmist offers us in verse 3?
"It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion".
Mt. Hermon is an impressive landmark that stands out against the dry plains north of Galilee. It’s the tallest mountain in Palestine at about 9000 feet, and its summit is usually covered in snow all year round. The moisture in the air around Mount Hermon makes it a fertile place and the snow melt feeds the Jordan river which waters the central valley that runs through the heart of the country.
The clergyman and explorer Henry Baker Tristram travelled widely in Palestine and wrote this of his visit to Mt Hermon in 1867:
"The vapour, coming in contact with the snowy sides of the mountain, is precipitated in the evening in the form of a dew, the most copious we ever experienced. It penetrated everywhere, and saturated everything. The floor of our tent was soaked, our bed was covered with it, our guns were dripping, and dewdrops hung about everywhere. No wonder that the foot of Hermon is clad with orchards and gardens of such marvellous fertility in this land of droughts."
Now in some of the commentaries I’ve read, they try to make out that the conditions around Mount Hermon sometimes prevail upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem. But having got out a map and ruler, I’m not inclined to buy that story because they’re 125 miles apart!
But wouldn’t it be great if it could! If some of that moist goodness of Northerly Hermon could come to bless the dry slopes of Mount Zion?
The point the Psalmist is making is that when brothers manage to live together in unity, it’s as wonderful and unexpected as snow or heavy rainfall on Mount Zion. With that precious outpouring, new things grow; and arid places become green with life.
It’s the same idea that God expresses through the prophet Isaiah when he says
“The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom.”
Can God really make the desert places between us bloom?
Can he turn our instinct to blame into a resolve to bless?
This Pslam promises that He can, if we are willing to let him.
Just hours before he would be arrested, Jesus made this request of all those who would believe in Him. He prayed, "Father, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:23
If the world looks at us and sees nothing but dischord – it will not see Christ. We may as well go home.
But if it looks at us, and sees folk whose love for God makes them resolve to love people, in all their particularity and difference, then maybe we're starting to get somewhere. Because that's the ideal this Psalm, this church, and this table point to: unity in the family of God.
(Some excerpts drawn from a sermon by K Edward Skidmore)
I think we can all agree that unity is good and pleasant.
I think we can also agree that it is rare!
If you come from a big family, you may well think that the words 'brothers' and 'unity' don’t belong in the same sentence. Brothers fight. Sisters fight. Sibling rivalry is alive and well in most families. Take a look at the first Biblical account of two brothers living together – Cain and Abel - and you soon discover that it ends in murder.
And much of world history shows that we keep repeating the same mistakes we made in Eden. We struggle with our brothers, we make war on our brothers, we exploit our brothers. Again and again and again.
But fortunately, there is one bastion of hope in all of this. The Church. You never get any disputes or fall outs in the church! In the church, the peace of Christ reigns and people live in perpetual harmony.
Aye right.
There’s a story about a woman who went to visit an institution for the criminally insane and she was shocked to see that there were only 3 guards supervising 100 dangerous inmates.
“Don’t you worry that these guys will band together and overpower you?” she asked one of the guards.
“Don’t worry about that,” the guard smiled. “Lunatics never unite.”
If you know much about Church History, you might conclude that the Church is full of Lunatics. You don’t need to be an Historian to see that the church also has a hard time with unity. The sheer range of denominations and schismatic groups in our part of the world is a vivid testimony to that.
And even within our own little sub-groups, many Christians still fail to get along. In congregations all across the World, people are quarrelling and quibbling. It seems almost impossible for Church folk to learn to live together in unity.
And our only saving grace is that it has ever been thus. We tend to look at the early church through rose coloured lenses and imagine it to have been some kind of utopian community.
But when you actually read the New Testament letters, you discover that nearly every one of them was written in response to difficulties and disputes within the church. There were factions, there were scandals, there were power-struggles. Read the book of Acts and you discover that even the luminaries of the early church, St Paul and St Peter, fell out at times.
Whether inside the church or outside the church, it’s a given that people will often struggle to get on with one another. Charles Schultz put it brilliantly in the words of his Peanuts character Linus:
“I Love Mankind. It’s People I Can’t Stand”.
And the problem with churches is that they’re full of people! People who think differently, want to worship differently, are socially or culturally different. It’s easy to say we love mankind in general. It’s very hard to love people in particular, especially when we differ with them.
But that’s what we’re called to. For the sake of the world, and the Kingdom of God, the church is called to pursue unity.
The difference between the world and the church isn’t that the world has fights and struggles and the church doesn’t, The difference is in how we deal with the fights and struggles when they come along. In the midst of our disputes, we in the church are called to pursue unity. It’s difficult! But how good and pleasant it is, the Psalmist says, when we achieve some measure of it.
Today’s Psalm gives us two word-pictures to show what Unity is like. Verse 2 says
"It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes".
That image is a snapshot of the day when Aaron – Moses brother - was first anointed as High Priest over the new nation of Israel. The oil that was poured over his head would have contained several strong spices: myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, and cassia, all blended together in a base of Olive Oil.
Now I don’t know when you last had your head doused in oil, but put yourself in Aaron’s shoes for a moment. How would he have felt, apart from wet and sticky?
He’s being blessed, isn’t he? Treated with dignity and respect. Something precious and expensive is being poured out on him, not just for his sake, but so the whole community can be ministered to through him. He’s never known anything like this – it’s profoundly moving. His body will carry the aroma from this experience for days if not weeks; his clothes will carry it for longer.
And there’s something delightfully wrong about what’s happening to him! You don’t pour a pint of aromatic oil over someone’s head, and you certainly don’t do it while they’re fully clothed. Think of the dry cleaning issues!
Performing the ceremony in that way says something. It says that grace is profligate; it’s unmerited; it’s determined to bless, and won’t be deterred by convention.
That, says the Psalmist, is a picture of the unity that should mark out the people of God.
How would it be, if in the middle of our disputes, we resolved not to go the way of the world, and instead decided to treat one another with dignity and respect? To pour out the precious, expensive commodities of our time, our listening and our patience on the other, even if we feel them to be undeserving of them.
How would it feel to bless someone in that way? Or to receive that blessing, when all you were expecting was more confrontation or criticism? It would surprise you. It might even change you.
“Aye, but they’re not living that way, God!"
“So what?” says God. "That’s their story, not yours. I’m talking to you right now. Maybe you’re the one I want to lead the way, and take the first step. Maybe it’s your example that will make all the difference."
Paul Negrut, the President of the Romanian Evangelical Alliance tells of a man who spent 17 years in prison under the Communist Regime for being a Christian.
Paul went to visit him one evening and arrived just as the secret police were leaving, and the man’s face was bloody and bruised from the beating they’d just dished out. Paul was furious, but his friend said “We’re not here to complain, Paul. We’re here to praise God. Let’s pray together.” So they knelt and prayed, and though Paul was so angry he was tongue-tied, his friend made up for it.
He prayed for the secret police, for the Communist Party, for those who had beaten him up. He asked God’s forgiveness for them, God’s blessing on them and God’s love to be poured out on their families.” Paul said he had never heard anyone pray for his enemies with such love.
After they’d prayed, his friend told him that the secret police came twice a week to torture him, and every time they came he looked into the eyes of the man who was beating him up and said “Sir, if we see each other before the throne of judgment, and if you are eternally lost, I want you to know that it is not because I hate you. It will be because you have rejected Jesus’ love and my love”.
Some time later, that policeman came back to the house on his own, but this time it wasn’t to dish out a beating. It was to say that he had become a Christian. He’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and after reflecting long and hard on his life he knew he had to make good the wrongs he’d done and seek forgiveness from those whom he’d hurt. He’d come to pray with the man he’d tortured.
A story where costly grace, poured out at great expense, brought unity.
But what of this second image of Unity the Psalmist offers us in verse 3?
"It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion".
Mt. Hermon is an impressive landmark that stands out against the dry plains north of Galilee. It’s the tallest mountain in Palestine at about 9000 feet, and its summit is usually covered in snow all year round. The moisture in the air around Mount Hermon makes it a fertile place and the snow melt feeds the Jordan river which waters the central valley that runs through the heart of the country.
The clergyman and explorer Henry Baker Tristram travelled widely in Palestine and wrote this of his visit to Mt Hermon in 1867:
"The vapour, coming in contact with the snowy sides of the mountain, is precipitated in the evening in the form of a dew, the most copious we ever experienced. It penetrated everywhere, and saturated everything. The floor of our tent was soaked, our bed was covered with it, our guns were dripping, and dewdrops hung about everywhere. No wonder that the foot of Hermon is clad with orchards and gardens of such marvellous fertility in this land of droughts."
Now in some of the commentaries I’ve read, they try to make out that the conditions around Mount Hermon sometimes prevail upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem. But having got out a map and ruler, I’m not inclined to buy that story because they’re 125 miles apart!
But wouldn’t it be great if it could! If some of that moist goodness of Northerly Hermon could come to bless the dry slopes of Mount Zion?
The point the Psalmist is making is that when brothers manage to live together in unity, it’s as wonderful and unexpected as snow or heavy rainfall on Mount Zion. With that precious outpouring, new things grow; and arid places become green with life.
It’s the same idea that God expresses through the prophet Isaiah when he says
“The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom.”
Can God really make the desert places between us bloom?
Can he turn our instinct to blame into a resolve to bless?
This Pslam promises that He can, if we are willing to let him.
Just hours before he would be arrested, Jesus made this request of all those who would believe in Him. He prayed, "Father, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:23
If the world looks at us and sees nothing but dischord – it will not see Christ. We may as well go home.
But if it looks at us, and sees folk whose love for God makes them resolve to love people, in all their particularity and difference, then maybe we're starting to get somewhere. Because that's the ideal this Psalm, this church, and this table point to: unity in the family of God.
(Some excerpts drawn from a sermon by K Edward Skidmore)
Monday, 24 October 2011
Psalm 132. Broken Promises?
I don’t mind telling you that Psalm 132 has been something of a struggle this week.
Psalm 131 tripped off the tongue – there was so much in that image of the weaned child with its mother that spoke into our experience.
But Psalm 132 has been very different. It’s the longest of the Psalms of The Ascent and it’s steeped in the language of temple and covenant; language we’re familiar with but which doesn’t necessarily move us or connect with us.
It assumes a lot of background knowledge too – things the people of Israel would have known, but only those with more than a passing interest in the Old Testament would know today.
But after much head scratching, I finally found a way in, and what I want to do is give you three snapshots of this Psalm, three perspectives on it which I think might help us. And then I’ll finish by saying a little about what it might mean for us.
So the here's first perspective – King David’s, which would date it at about 1000 BC.
More by accident than design I gave you some helpful background for today’s Psalm a couple of weeks ago when we were looking at Psalm 131. David, the shepherd boy who became King, wanted nothing more than to build a temple for his God. It would be a place to worship, and also a place to house the Ark of the Covenant which was an ornate box containing the law of Moses: a symbol of God’s enduring presence with them.
If you’re interested in the story you can read it for yourselves in 2nd Samuel chapter 7, but the first few verses read like this:
“After King David was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the Ark of God remains in a tent”. Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you”.
Now – a wee bit of history here. Way back before David’s time, the Ark of the Covenant had been captured by the Philistines, but they soon discovered that whatever town of theirs it rested in began to suffer illnesses and hardship. Putting two and two together, they reckoned this had to be Israel’s God taking revenge. So to get rid of the thing they placed it on a cart, pulled by two oxen, and sent it over the border back into Israelite territory.
The people of Beth Shemesh found it, and they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing at first. And after some deliberation they took it to the house of a man called Abinadab and placed guards over it. And the Ark remained there for decades because King Saul, being the man he was, tended to want to keep God at arms length.
But when David became King, he wanted the Ark back in Jerusalem as a symbol of God’s centrality to all that they were as a people. So he organised a great procession, where they carried the Ark all the way up to Jerusalem, with sacrifices and fanfares along the way, and with David himself leading the dancing at the head of the march.
But there was still no permanent place to put it. In the years they’d wandered in the desert after escaping from Egypt, the Ark was kept in a special tent, and once again a tent was its home, albeit a tent pitched in the heart of the city. David lived in a palace while the Ark of God lived under canvas. And he didn’t feel that was right.
So with that history, we now have a handle on verses 1-9 of the Psalm. Verses 1-5 are about David’s honourable desire to build a temple. Verse 6 says “We heard it in Ephrathah, we came upon it in the fields of Jaar”, and that’s looking back to that time when the Philistines sent the Ark back into Israelite territory. And verses 7-9 are talking about that first great procession up to Jerusalem with the Ark – a day of feasting and worship.
About 30 years later a magnificent temple was built to house the Ark – one of the wonders of the then known world - but it was David’s son Solomon who built it, not David himself.
Now there are two things I want you to note from the rest of the Psalm – two promises of God.
The first is the promise to bless David’s line: 11-12
“The Lord swore an oath to David, a sure oath that he will not revoke; “One of your own descendants I will place on your throne – if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The second is the promise of God’s presence – vs 13,14 “The Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling; “This is my resting place for ever and ever; here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it”.
So at this point, two promises weave themselves into the fabric of Israel’s story – a promise to do with David’s line, and a promise to do with God’s presence. And we’ll come back to those shortly.
Now, fast forward with me a few decades to our second snapshot. David’s been and gone and this time, we’re among the pilgrims singing the Psalms of the Ascent on our way up to Jerusalem.
At the heart of the city is Solomon’s beautiful temple. Some of us have seen it before, others are eagerly anticipating our first glimpse of it. We remember David’s good intentions in our songs; we rejoice as we remember how the Ark came back into our hands from the Philistines, and as we make our way up to the city, we remember that very first procession when David brought the Ark home with joy and dancing.
We’re a part of that, we think. We are the inheritors of those two promises. David’s descendants are still on the throne, God’s presence is still with us in the temple and all is well with the world.
Now, fast forward with me one last time, about 400 years to 586 BC. This is our third snapshot.
The plains around Jerusalem are swarming with soldiers. A vast army from Babylon has surrounded the city and kept it under siege for almost two years. The people are starving and some are eating their children to stay alive.
The walls finally give way and the defences are breached. The Israelite soldiers try to make a break for freedom, but they’re slaughtered as they go. King Zedekiah is taken and the last thing he sees before they clap him in chains and gouge out his eyes is his sons being slaughtered.
Sit and watch that scene in your minds eye for a moment. You’re on a hill beside Jerusalem. The gorgeous façade of the temple now engulfed in flames, as solders carry away the last of the sacred vessels and fittings, laughing as they go. A few of the priests offer some resistance, but it’s utterly futile. The Ark of the Covenant is either burning or taken – no-one knows which, but it will never be seen again. The royal palace is ablaze, the King’s family slaughtered. You watch him stumbling blindly over the rubble, dragged along by chains at the front of the long, snaking line of captives.
What of Psalm 132 now? What of those promises? A descendant of David on the throne for ever? God’s presence with them for ever?
Those words must have sounded pretty hollow, as a pagan army marched through the streets of the city God was said to dwell in, and systematically reduced it to rubble.
So there you are: three snapshots of this Psalm, seen from different perspectives.
And now three observations, given what we've just said.
Firstly – a word about ifs and buts.
I know I’ve said it recently, but I’ll say it again just now. We need to pay more attention to the ifs and buts in the Bible. God makes promises, and God being God we can be sure he will see them through. But more often than not, God’s promises come with conditions, and the promises in Psalm 132 are a good example of that:
Listen to verse 12 again:
“if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The promise comes with a condition. If your descendants keep the covenant and the statutes, then they’ll have the throne for ever. Did they keep the statutes and the covenant? No. David was good, Solomon started well but finished badly and from then on it was a rollercoaster ride over 4 centuries with more bad kings than good, some of whom even took up the practice of the local gods and got involved in ritual sacrifice of their own children.
Was God beholden to such men because he’d made a promise centuries earlier to David? I don’t think so…..
God promises to bless his people, but the condition of the blessing is faithfulness to God. Step outside that, and there are no guarantees.
In a way it’s like a couple getting married – they enter into a covenant in faith, trusting each other. But if, after a few weeks or months or years, it becomes clear that one of the partners has no intention of keeping the vows they took, is the other one beholden to stay with them despite serial infidelity, or domestic abuse? I’m not sure that’s what the Scriptures teach. Jesus says that divorce is not desirable, but he also says it’s permissible where one or other partner has not been faithful to the covenant of marriage.
Israel thought God was duty bound to keep things as they were. After all – he’d made promises to them! But they’d forgotten that those promises came with an ‘if’.
Secondly – a word about exile.
I don’t doubt that as they were marched out of Jerusalem, those people were convinced that they had been abandoned by God for ever. The Davidic line was severed, and the temple was destroyed. As far as they were concerned, that was the end of the story.
Only it wasn’t.
About 150 years later, with the then Emperor’s blessing, a remnant led by Nehemiah returned and rebuilt the walls and the temple and many of the exiles returned home to live in their own land again.
What felt like the end wasn’t the end. In exile, the people of Israel learned a really important lesson – they learned that they could still be the people of God without a temple, without a king, and without a homeland.
Perhaps these things had become too important to them. Perhaps being stripped of them reminded them that what really mattered was that they did what the ten commandments asked of them and learned to love God and love neighbour.
There’s a lesson for us there, I think.
All of us find ourselves wedded to particular aspects of church life – the things we have a particular in investment in. Might be the building, the style of worship, the music we find meaningful, a group of people we feel especially at home with, a particular pew that we sit in.
Can those things become too important to us? Well, if they become what we focus on, rather than the business of loving God and loving neighbour, then I think we have our answer.
Try this for a thought exercise. For the first 300 years of its existence, the churches met not in dedicated buildings, but in homes, where people prayed together, sang together, ate together and reflected on Scripture together. They shared their lives with one another at a deep level. But they had nothing else to offer. If that’s what your local church were like, would you want to go along to it?
At its foundational level, before it’s about anything else, the church should be a community where, in fellowship, we are learning to love God and neighbour. Everything else, everything else should be secondary.
When he was starting out in ministry, planting a new church in the suburbs of Baltimore, Eugene Peterson went door to door in the community he was living in, inviting folk along to his first service. They met downstairs in the basement of his home, with the only natural light coming in through some small slatted windows near ceiling level. They sat on stacking chairs, and the only church furniture they had had been donated by a local church that was closing down. Around fifty folk came.
They met there for three years, with nothing much to offer in terms of aesthetics or beauty, but lots to offer in terms of fellowship and friendship. The church grew. Because of its subterranean character, some of the youth nicknamed it Catacombs Presbyterian Church, and the joke caught on.
After three years they had raised enough money to build a sanctuary. They worked hard on the project, they built a beautiful and functional church building. And once it got built, something changed. A good number of folk stopped attending every week.
On reflection. Peterson realised that in the beginning, with no aesthetics to distract them, fellowship and worship was what it was all about. But the minute they had a dedicated building, that became the focus for some of his people. The ground of their commitment shifted from the community to the building. They lost something in moving from the Catacombs to the new Sanctuary, and he spent the next few years of his work trying to counteract that.
Peterson’s folk started in exile in their sparse little Catacomb church; Israel ended up in exile. But either way, exile teaches us something. It teaches us that we really don’t need what we think we need in order to be the people of God.
One last word to end with….
Read today’s Psalm in the light of the burning temple, and we might well say ‘so much for those promises God made. Now there’s no king, and no temple”.
But in a way that neither David nor the Psalmist could have guessed, God fulfilled both of those promises in Christ.
Every Christmas we read about how Mary and Joseph had to return to Bethlehem for the census. Why did they have to do that? Because Bethlehem was David’s town, and they were of David’s line.
What does the Psalm say? “One of your descendants I will place on your throne”.
One of the first things Matthew and Luke do in their accounts of the birth of Jesus is show through detailed genealogies that Jesus’ ancestry went all the way back to David. This newborn king, this King of Kings, who reigns for ever, is of David’s line. That's the first promise.
And do you remember what Jesus said as he walked in the courts of the Temple in his own day, the one built as much for Herod’s vanity as any desire to worship? “Destroy this temple and I will build it again in three days”.
He was drawing a parallel between the temple and his own body. What did he mean by that? Well what made the temple special wasn’t its magnificence, but the promise God had made to be present there.
It was God’s presence that counted, and In Jesus, the people of his day had God’s presence with them in a unique way – not in bricks and mortar, but in flesh and blood.
But he promised still more than that. In talking to a Samaritan woman by a well Jesus pointed to a day when temples would no longer be the focus because God’s Spirit would be present in the hearts of those who believed.
“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks”.
Jesus, the descendant of David, made it possible for anyone who wanted it, to know the intimate presence of God: anytime and anywhere.
In Jesus, the promise of a royal line, and the divine presence, coalesced.
The promises of Psalm 132, made 1000 years earlier, weren’t forgotten. They were fulfilled in a way that no-one could ever have imagined.
Thanks be to God.
Psalm 131 tripped off the tongue – there was so much in that image of the weaned child with its mother that spoke into our experience.
But Psalm 132 has been very different. It’s the longest of the Psalms of The Ascent and it’s steeped in the language of temple and covenant; language we’re familiar with but which doesn’t necessarily move us or connect with us.
It assumes a lot of background knowledge too – things the people of Israel would have known, but only those with more than a passing interest in the Old Testament would know today.
But after much head scratching, I finally found a way in, and what I want to do is give you three snapshots of this Psalm, three perspectives on it which I think might help us. And then I’ll finish by saying a little about what it might mean for us.
So the here's first perspective – King David’s, which would date it at about 1000 BC.
More by accident than design I gave you some helpful background for today’s Psalm a couple of weeks ago when we were looking at Psalm 131. David, the shepherd boy who became King, wanted nothing more than to build a temple for his God. It would be a place to worship, and also a place to house the Ark of the Covenant which was an ornate box containing the law of Moses: a symbol of God’s enduring presence with them.
If you’re interested in the story you can read it for yourselves in 2nd Samuel chapter 7, but the first few verses read like this:
“After King David was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the Ark of God remains in a tent”. Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you”.
Now – a wee bit of history here. Way back before David’s time, the Ark of the Covenant had been captured by the Philistines, but they soon discovered that whatever town of theirs it rested in began to suffer illnesses and hardship. Putting two and two together, they reckoned this had to be Israel’s God taking revenge. So to get rid of the thing they placed it on a cart, pulled by two oxen, and sent it over the border back into Israelite territory.
The people of Beth Shemesh found it, and they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing at first. And after some deliberation they took it to the house of a man called Abinadab and placed guards over it. And the Ark remained there for decades because King Saul, being the man he was, tended to want to keep God at arms length.
But when David became King, he wanted the Ark back in Jerusalem as a symbol of God’s centrality to all that they were as a people. So he organised a great procession, where they carried the Ark all the way up to Jerusalem, with sacrifices and fanfares along the way, and with David himself leading the dancing at the head of the march.
But there was still no permanent place to put it. In the years they’d wandered in the desert after escaping from Egypt, the Ark was kept in a special tent, and once again a tent was its home, albeit a tent pitched in the heart of the city. David lived in a palace while the Ark of God lived under canvas. And he didn’t feel that was right.
So with that history, we now have a handle on verses 1-9 of the Psalm. Verses 1-5 are about David’s honourable desire to build a temple. Verse 6 says “We heard it in Ephrathah, we came upon it in the fields of Jaar”, and that’s looking back to that time when the Philistines sent the Ark back into Israelite territory. And verses 7-9 are talking about that first great procession up to Jerusalem with the Ark – a day of feasting and worship.
About 30 years later a magnificent temple was built to house the Ark – one of the wonders of the then known world - but it was David’s son Solomon who built it, not David himself.
Now there are two things I want you to note from the rest of the Psalm – two promises of God.
The first is the promise to bless David’s line: 11-12
“The Lord swore an oath to David, a sure oath that he will not revoke; “One of your own descendants I will place on your throne – if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The second is the promise of God’s presence – vs 13,14 “The Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling; “This is my resting place for ever and ever; here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it”.
So at this point, two promises weave themselves into the fabric of Israel’s story – a promise to do with David’s line, and a promise to do with God’s presence. And we’ll come back to those shortly.
Now, fast forward with me a few decades to our second snapshot. David’s been and gone and this time, we’re among the pilgrims singing the Psalms of the Ascent on our way up to Jerusalem.
At the heart of the city is Solomon’s beautiful temple. Some of us have seen it before, others are eagerly anticipating our first glimpse of it. We remember David’s good intentions in our songs; we rejoice as we remember how the Ark came back into our hands from the Philistines, and as we make our way up to the city, we remember that very first procession when David brought the Ark home with joy and dancing.
We’re a part of that, we think. We are the inheritors of those two promises. David’s descendants are still on the throne, God’s presence is still with us in the temple and all is well with the world.
Now, fast forward with me one last time, about 400 years to 586 BC. This is our third snapshot.
The plains around Jerusalem are swarming with soldiers. A vast army from Babylon has surrounded the city and kept it under siege for almost two years. The people are starving and some are eating their children to stay alive.
The walls finally give way and the defences are breached. The Israelite soldiers try to make a break for freedom, but they’re slaughtered as they go. King Zedekiah is taken and the last thing he sees before they clap him in chains and gouge out his eyes is his sons being slaughtered.
Sit and watch that scene in your minds eye for a moment. You’re on a hill beside Jerusalem. The gorgeous façade of the temple now engulfed in flames, as solders carry away the last of the sacred vessels and fittings, laughing as they go. A few of the priests offer some resistance, but it’s utterly futile. The Ark of the Covenant is either burning or taken – no-one knows which, but it will never be seen again. The royal palace is ablaze, the King’s family slaughtered. You watch him stumbling blindly over the rubble, dragged along by chains at the front of the long, snaking line of captives.
What of Psalm 132 now? What of those promises? A descendant of David on the throne for ever? God’s presence with them for ever?
Those words must have sounded pretty hollow, as a pagan army marched through the streets of the city God was said to dwell in, and systematically reduced it to rubble.
So there you are: three snapshots of this Psalm, seen from different perspectives.
And now three observations, given what we've just said.
Firstly – a word about ifs and buts.
I know I’ve said it recently, but I’ll say it again just now. We need to pay more attention to the ifs and buts in the Bible. God makes promises, and God being God we can be sure he will see them through. But more often than not, God’s promises come with conditions, and the promises in Psalm 132 are a good example of that:
Listen to verse 12 again:
“if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The promise comes with a condition. If your descendants keep the covenant and the statutes, then they’ll have the throne for ever. Did they keep the statutes and the covenant? No. David was good, Solomon started well but finished badly and from then on it was a rollercoaster ride over 4 centuries with more bad kings than good, some of whom even took up the practice of the local gods and got involved in ritual sacrifice of their own children.
Was God beholden to such men because he’d made a promise centuries earlier to David? I don’t think so…..
God promises to bless his people, but the condition of the blessing is faithfulness to God. Step outside that, and there are no guarantees.
In a way it’s like a couple getting married – they enter into a covenant in faith, trusting each other. But if, after a few weeks or months or years, it becomes clear that one of the partners has no intention of keeping the vows they took, is the other one beholden to stay with them despite serial infidelity, or domestic abuse? I’m not sure that’s what the Scriptures teach. Jesus says that divorce is not desirable, but he also says it’s permissible where one or other partner has not been faithful to the covenant of marriage.
Israel thought God was duty bound to keep things as they were. After all – he’d made promises to them! But they’d forgotten that those promises came with an ‘if’.
Secondly – a word about exile.
I don’t doubt that as they were marched out of Jerusalem, those people were convinced that they had been abandoned by God for ever. The Davidic line was severed, and the temple was destroyed. As far as they were concerned, that was the end of the story.
Only it wasn’t.
About 150 years later, with the then Emperor’s blessing, a remnant led by Nehemiah returned and rebuilt the walls and the temple and many of the exiles returned home to live in their own land again.
What felt like the end wasn’t the end. In exile, the people of Israel learned a really important lesson – they learned that they could still be the people of God without a temple, without a king, and without a homeland.
Perhaps these things had become too important to them. Perhaps being stripped of them reminded them that what really mattered was that they did what the ten commandments asked of them and learned to love God and love neighbour.
There’s a lesson for us there, I think.
All of us find ourselves wedded to particular aspects of church life – the things we have a particular in investment in. Might be the building, the style of worship, the music we find meaningful, a group of people we feel especially at home with, a particular pew that we sit in.
Can those things become too important to us? Well, if they become what we focus on, rather than the business of loving God and loving neighbour, then I think we have our answer.
Try this for a thought exercise. For the first 300 years of its existence, the churches met not in dedicated buildings, but in homes, where people prayed together, sang together, ate together and reflected on Scripture together. They shared their lives with one another at a deep level. But they had nothing else to offer. If that’s what your local church were like, would you want to go along to it?
At its foundational level, before it’s about anything else, the church should be a community where, in fellowship, we are learning to love God and neighbour. Everything else, everything else should be secondary.
When he was starting out in ministry, planting a new church in the suburbs of Baltimore, Eugene Peterson went door to door in the community he was living in, inviting folk along to his first service. They met downstairs in the basement of his home, with the only natural light coming in through some small slatted windows near ceiling level. They sat on stacking chairs, and the only church furniture they had had been donated by a local church that was closing down. Around fifty folk came.
They met there for three years, with nothing much to offer in terms of aesthetics or beauty, but lots to offer in terms of fellowship and friendship. The church grew. Because of its subterranean character, some of the youth nicknamed it Catacombs Presbyterian Church, and the joke caught on.
After three years they had raised enough money to build a sanctuary. They worked hard on the project, they built a beautiful and functional church building. And once it got built, something changed. A good number of folk stopped attending every week.
On reflection. Peterson realised that in the beginning, with no aesthetics to distract them, fellowship and worship was what it was all about. But the minute they had a dedicated building, that became the focus for some of his people. The ground of their commitment shifted from the community to the building. They lost something in moving from the Catacombs to the new Sanctuary, and he spent the next few years of his work trying to counteract that.
Peterson’s folk started in exile in their sparse little Catacomb church; Israel ended up in exile. But either way, exile teaches us something. It teaches us that we really don’t need what we think we need in order to be the people of God.
One last word to end with….
Read today’s Psalm in the light of the burning temple, and we might well say ‘so much for those promises God made. Now there’s no king, and no temple”.
But in a way that neither David nor the Psalmist could have guessed, God fulfilled both of those promises in Christ.
Every Christmas we read about how Mary and Joseph had to return to Bethlehem for the census. Why did they have to do that? Because Bethlehem was David’s town, and they were of David’s line.
What does the Psalm say? “One of your descendants I will place on your throne”.
One of the first things Matthew and Luke do in their accounts of the birth of Jesus is show through detailed genealogies that Jesus’ ancestry went all the way back to David. This newborn king, this King of Kings, who reigns for ever, is of David’s line. That's the first promise.
And do you remember what Jesus said as he walked in the courts of the Temple in his own day, the one built as much for Herod’s vanity as any desire to worship? “Destroy this temple and I will build it again in three days”.
He was drawing a parallel between the temple and his own body. What did he mean by that? Well what made the temple special wasn’t its magnificence, but the promise God had made to be present there.
It was God’s presence that counted, and In Jesus, the people of his day had God’s presence with them in a unique way – not in bricks and mortar, but in flesh and blood.
But he promised still more than that. In talking to a Samaritan woman by a well Jesus pointed to a day when temples would no longer be the focus because God’s Spirit would be present in the hearts of those who believed.
“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks”.
Jesus, the descendant of David, made it possible for anyone who wanted it, to know the intimate presence of God: anytime and anywhere.
In Jesus, the promise of a royal line, and the divine presence, coalesced.
The promises of Psalm 132, made 1000 years earlier, weren’t forgotten. They were fulfilled in a way that no-one could ever have imagined.
Thanks be to God.
Monday, 10 October 2011
Psalm 131. Repose After Struggle
The great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said of this Psalm that it’s one of the shortest to read, but one of the longest to learn.
It’s a beautiful Psalm – a wee jewel, full of meaning and wisdom – but it’s easily overlooked because it’s so small.
So today we’re going to linger for a while over each of its three verses, and give ourselves some time to meditate on what it is that God may be saying to us through these words.
The Hebrew Title at the head of the Psalm says “A Psalm of David”, and it helps to get the Psalm in context if we remind ourselves of who David was…
David was a shepherd boy who was plucked from obscurity at the age of 16 and, much to the amazement of his family, was anointed by the prophet Samuel to become the next King of Israel.
David wasn’t the most likely candidate. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest of his brothers; compared to them, as fighting men, he was relatively inexperienced. But none of that mattered, either to God or to Samuel. Why? Because, in Samuel’s own words, “The Lord doesn’t look at the things that people look at. People look at the outward appearance. But the Lord looks at the heart.”
David’s heart commended him to God. He was King material. The only problem was there already was a King – King Saul. Saul had been making a mess of things since the day he was anointed and God had lost patience with him. But he was still on the throne. And as David emerged as a great military leader with huge popularity among the people, Saul grew more and more jealous of him, and eventually that broke out in open hostility. He wanted David’s life.
So David fled, with some of his supporters, and they moved from place to place to keep out of harm’s way. Now David could easily have mustered the support to overthrow Saul. In fact, there were a couple of instances when Saul, unknowingly, was utterly at David’s mercy.
One of my favourites is when Saul and his men were tracking David across the country, and Saul went into a cave to ‘relieve himself’ . But it’s the very cave that David and his men are hiding out in. They could have run him through there and then. He was utterly defenceless. But they didn’t do it.
David was adamant that they had to wait for God’s timing, and even though the throne was within his grasp, and he was being unfairly pursued and threatened by Saul, he refused to stretch out his hand and kill him.
In the end, Saul chose to fall on his own sword at the end of a battle he was losing, David became king, and so began a great era in Israel’s history. And David wanted nothing more than to build a temple to the God who had chosen him and delivered him from Saul. But for his own reasons, God said ‘no, David’ – that honour will belong to one of your sons, but not to you. It was Solomon who later fulfilled that dream.
Now with that little bit of history, I hope these words will make more sense now, as words of David.
“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
Or things too wonderful for me”.
Here was a man caught up in great matters, who had the power to stretch out his hand and take whatever he wanted. But for the best part of his life, he fought those urges, he submitted them to God’s will. He accepted his place, and God’s timing.
That was David.
But what about you and me? What does this verse of the Psalm say to us?
Well it talks about three things we need to be aware of – our hearts, our eyes and our pride.
The Scriptures talk a lot about the heart – the seat of the emotions.
It says in the Proverbs that the heart is the wellspring of life, but the prophet Jeremiah also warns us that the heart can be deceitful above all things.
The heart can be the source of our life, but it can also be the architect of our destruction. David’s heart led him to live honourably – Saul’s to a bitter end. What was the difference? I think it was down to the kind of thoughts they entertained there. That’s why the writer of Proverbs says “Above all else, guard your heart – for it is the wellspring of life”.
What does a guard do? A guard takes care with what, or who, gains entry.
The bouncer’s on the door to stop troublemakers getting in to the club. The airport security checks are there to stop the wrong kind of people getting on the plane and taking it over.
Be careful what thoughts you let enter your heart. If you let the wrong sort get through, you might find they’re terribly difficult to evict later on. You might find that they take over, and take you off in directions you really don’t want to go in.
And the thing is, what takes hold of your heart profoundly affects your ability to see. Saul’s heart became full of fear and conspiracy theories. And because of that he came to see David as an enemy, even though David was a faithful and honourable subject with no malice in his heart.
Equally well, we know the stories about Mother Teresa and people like her, whose hearts are so gripped by a vision of Jesus and a love for God, that they can see past the festering wounds of the person they’re caring for to the child of God within.
I see this again and again in my life as a pastor. What you hold and store up in your heart determines how you see things. If you cherish bitterness you’ll see reasons to take offence. If you cherish anger, you’ll find cause for provocation. If you cherish faith, hope and love, you’ll see the possibilities in every person and every situation.
Above all else, guard your heart, says the writer.
David, it seems to me, knew how to guard his heart.
And that’s why he could say: “My heart is not proud. My eyes are not haughty”.
Ever since the dawn of time, religious folk of all persuasions have understood that the most dangerous sins aren’t the ones done in the body – the ones the tabloids love - but the ones entertained and encouraged in the mind.
Jesus was relatively kind to the hookers and the drunks. He came down like a ton of bricks on the clean-living Pharisees.
The chief of sins has always been the sin of pride. Tradition holds that it was pride that led to Lucifer’s fall from heaven; it was pride in their own ability to make wise decisions that led Adam and Eve to eat the apple.
Pride is the root sin, because pride is always about the imperious ‘I’. It’s all about me. Me, me, me.
My pain, my desires, my needs, my wants, my ambition.
If you have a self - and I think that includes most of us here this morning – the chief temptation is always to be self-ish. Not in the sense of being greedy or avaricious, but in living our lives as though the story of my needs and wants and desires is the most important story around.
That’s what we’re born into. That’s our natural state. The scientists tell us it may even be embedded in our genetic code.
No-one has to tell the newborn baby to scream and cry for milk – to demand feeding at the breast of its mother. The ‘imperious I’ kicks in the minute we’re born. And things are fine as long as mother feeds. But months or years later, when mother decides the time’s come to withold milk so the child can graduate to food, that’s when the trouble starts.
For the first time, the Imperious I doesn’t get what it wants. A battle of wills begins with tears and tantrums. But in the end, there’s only ever one winner, evidenced by the fact that we’re all going home to mince and tatties after church today and not a nice drink of warm milk. Eventually, unless something is drastically wrong, we all move onto solids.
And the struggle to change the child’s diet so it’s ready for the rest of its life is accompanied by a very significant development in the child’s psyche.
If we could listen in to the newborn’s thought processes we’d hear it yelling “I, I, I, I, I, I. I'm hungry, I'm wet, I'm dirty, I'm tired." But the weaned child, lying in its mother’s arms, wanting her not for her food, but for herself, snuggles in and experiences a new rhythm as their hearts beat in unison – “I – Thou”
It’s been a struggle, but the child has learned an important lesson. None of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.
I’ve known and loved this Psalm for years, and I’ve always thought of it as lovely and peaceful. And it is.
But it’s only as I’ve thought about it this time round that I’ve come to understand that the peace we find here, in this beautiful image of the mother and the weaned child, is a hard-won peace that comes after a long hard battle.
“Repose after struggle” is the way Spurgeon put it.
And that’s a word that speaks to us today because we all know the demands of the imperious I. David certainly did – he was no saint. Saw a woman he wanted – took her. He could do that, he was King. Got her pregnant – then had her husband killed to try and cover up the mess. I I I I I
But more often than not, the road David chose was the one he spells out in this Psalm.
“I do not concern myself with great matters, or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quietened my soul; like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me”.
This is a Psalm of battle. The battle you and I have to still our souls before God; to recognise when we’re behaving like an imperious I; to struggle and pray and talk our way to a better place and a better rhythm, where the I, I, I, I becomes I-Thou, I-Thou, I-Thou.
This Psalm reminds us that none of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.
What would our families be like; what would our churches be like, if we had a little more “I-Thou” and a little less “I,I,I,I”. A little less defending of territory and a little more generosity towards others? A little less falling out and a little more forebearing?
Wouldn’t it be better, for everyone? Of course it would!
But is God going to step in and magic things better? Not according to David. This is a fight. We have to struggle to come to peace within ourselves and between ourselves. It doesn’t come naturally. We have to work at it. We have to overcome our instincts.
“I have stilled and quietened my soul” says David, because it wasn’t still – it wasn’t quiet. It was agitated and upset. And he struggled, and it was hard, but he found himself in a better place:
Like a weaned child is my soul within me. I'm growing up, in other words. I'm learning to rest in God.
If that’s the work that’s needing done in you this morning, David's encouraging you that it can be done; but he’s also telling you that nobody else can do it for you. “I have stilled and quietened MY soul”.
**********
Many vital life lessons from this shortest of Psalms.
Guard your heart – be careful what gets in there and takes root,
Because once it’s in there, it’ll affect what you see.
If you want to know peace, you have to struggle. You have to let God help you turn that I,I,I,I into I-Thou, I-Thou.
And in closing, let me make one last observation.
Verse 3 is almost a footnote to the Psalm and we’re not sure whether it belongs to David, or whether someone else added this to the end many years later.
It says “O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore”
And as I read through the Psalm I realised what a wonderful progression there is in these three short verses.
We start with the Imperious I, we progress to I-Thou, and we end with an all-embracing ‘we’. The Psalmist addresses Israel - the whole people – wishing, willing them to know God as that loving, patient, occasionally embattled mother, who knows what’s best and will struggle with us out of love until we bend to her wisdom.
That is the love in whose arms we rest this morning.
Thanks be to God
Let us pray
Almighty God,to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden;
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your name,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Help us still and quieten our souls before you.
Help us not to be enslaved to the tyranny of the imperious I,
But learn to make room for a Thou,
Be it you, or you as we find you in other people.
Help us know ourselves as people in relation;
Willing and able to give and take
For the good of all.
So hear our prayers,
Because we offer them all in the name of our friend and saviour, Jesus Christ,
Amen
It’s a beautiful Psalm – a wee jewel, full of meaning and wisdom – but it’s easily overlooked because it’s so small.
So today we’re going to linger for a while over each of its three verses, and give ourselves some time to meditate on what it is that God may be saying to us through these words.
The Hebrew Title at the head of the Psalm says “A Psalm of David”, and it helps to get the Psalm in context if we remind ourselves of who David was…
David was a shepherd boy who was plucked from obscurity at the age of 16 and, much to the amazement of his family, was anointed by the prophet Samuel to become the next King of Israel.
David wasn’t the most likely candidate. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest of his brothers; compared to them, as fighting men, he was relatively inexperienced. But none of that mattered, either to God or to Samuel. Why? Because, in Samuel’s own words, “The Lord doesn’t look at the things that people look at. People look at the outward appearance. But the Lord looks at the heart.”
David’s heart commended him to God. He was King material. The only problem was there already was a King – King Saul. Saul had been making a mess of things since the day he was anointed and God had lost patience with him. But he was still on the throne. And as David emerged as a great military leader with huge popularity among the people, Saul grew more and more jealous of him, and eventually that broke out in open hostility. He wanted David’s life.
So David fled, with some of his supporters, and they moved from place to place to keep out of harm’s way. Now David could easily have mustered the support to overthrow Saul. In fact, there were a couple of instances when Saul, unknowingly, was utterly at David’s mercy.
One of my favourites is when Saul and his men were tracking David across the country, and Saul went into a cave to ‘relieve himself’ . But it’s the very cave that David and his men are hiding out in. They could have run him through there and then. He was utterly defenceless. But they didn’t do it.
David was adamant that they had to wait for God’s timing, and even though the throne was within his grasp, and he was being unfairly pursued and threatened by Saul, he refused to stretch out his hand and kill him.
In the end, Saul chose to fall on his own sword at the end of a battle he was losing, David became king, and so began a great era in Israel’s history. And David wanted nothing more than to build a temple to the God who had chosen him and delivered him from Saul. But for his own reasons, God said ‘no, David’ – that honour will belong to one of your sons, but not to you. It was Solomon who later fulfilled that dream.
Now with that little bit of history, I hope these words will make more sense now, as words of David.
“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
Or things too wonderful for me”.
Here was a man caught up in great matters, who had the power to stretch out his hand and take whatever he wanted. But for the best part of his life, he fought those urges, he submitted them to God’s will. He accepted his place, and God’s timing.
That was David.
But what about you and me? What does this verse of the Psalm say to us?
Well it talks about three things we need to be aware of – our hearts, our eyes and our pride.
The Scriptures talk a lot about the heart – the seat of the emotions.
It says in the Proverbs that the heart is the wellspring of life, but the prophet Jeremiah also warns us that the heart can be deceitful above all things.
The heart can be the source of our life, but it can also be the architect of our destruction. David’s heart led him to live honourably – Saul’s to a bitter end. What was the difference? I think it was down to the kind of thoughts they entertained there. That’s why the writer of Proverbs says “Above all else, guard your heart – for it is the wellspring of life”.
What does a guard do? A guard takes care with what, or who, gains entry.
The bouncer’s on the door to stop troublemakers getting in to the club. The airport security checks are there to stop the wrong kind of people getting on the plane and taking it over.
Be careful what thoughts you let enter your heart. If you let the wrong sort get through, you might find they’re terribly difficult to evict later on. You might find that they take over, and take you off in directions you really don’t want to go in.
And the thing is, what takes hold of your heart profoundly affects your ability to see. Saul’s heart became full of fear and conspiracy theories. And because of that he came to see David as an enemy, even though David was a faithful and honourable subject with no malice in his heart.
Equally well, we know the stories about Mother Teresa and people like her, whose hearts are so gripped by a vision of Jesus and a love for God, that they can see past the festering wounds of the person they’re caring for to the child of God within.
I see this again and again in my life as a pastor. What you hold and store up in your heart determines how you see things. If you cherish bitterness you’ll see reasons to take offence. If you cherish anger, you’ll find cause for provocation. If you cherish faith, hope and love, you’ll see the possibilities in every person and every situation.
Above all else, guard your heart, says the writer.
David, it seems to me, knew how to guard his heart.
And that’s why he could say: “My heart is not proud. My eyes are not haughty”.
Ever since the dawn of time, religious folk of all persuasions have understood that the most dangerous sins aren’t the ones done in the body – the ones the tabloids love - but the ones entertained and encouraged in the mind.
Jesus was relatively kind to the hookers and the drunks. He came down like a ton of bricks on the clean-living Pharisees.
The chief of sins has always been the sin of pride. Tradition holds that it was pride that led to Lucifer’s fall from heaven; it was pride in their own ability to make wise decisions that led Adam and Eve to eat the apple.
Pride is the root sin, because pride is always about the imperious ‘I’. It’s all about me. Me, me, me.
My pain, my desires, my needs, my wants, my ambition.
If you have a self - and I think that includes most of us here this morning – the chief temptation is always to be self-ish. Not in the sense of being greedy or avaricious, but in living our lives as though the story of my needs and wants and desires is the most important story around.
That’s what we’re born into. That’s our natural state. The scientists tell us it may even be embedded in our genetic code.
No-one has to tell the newborn baby to scream and cry for milk – to demand feeding at the breast of its mother. The ‘imperious I’ kicks in the minute we’re born. And things are fine as long as mother feeds. But months or years later, when mother decides the time’s come to withold milk so the child can graduate to food, that’s when the trouble starts.
For the first time, the Imperious I doesn’t get what it wants. A battle of wills begins with tears and tantrums. But in the end, there’s only ever one winner, evidenced by the fact that we’re all going home to mince and tatties after church today and not a nice drink of warm milk. Eventually, unless something is drastically wrong, we all move onto solids.
And the struggle to change the child’s diet so it’s ready for the rest of its life is accompanied by a very significant development in the child’s psyche.
If we could listen in to the newborn’s thought processes we’d hear it yelling “I, I, I, I, I, I. I'm hungry, I'm wet, I'm dirty, I'm tired." But the weaned child, lying in its mother’s arms, wanting her not for her food, but for herself, snuggles in and experiences a new rhythm as their hearts beat in unison – “I – Thou”
It’s been a struggle, but the child has learned an important lesson. None of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.
I’ve known and loved this Psalm for years, and I’ve always thought of it as lovely and peaceful. And it is.
But it’s only as I’ve thought about it this time round that I’ve come to understand that the peace we find here, in this beautiful image of the mother and the weaned child, is a hard-won peace that comes after a long hard battle.
“Repose after struggle” is the way Spurgeon put it.
And that’s a word that speaks to us today because we all know the demands of the imperious I. David certainly did – he was no saint. Saw a woman he wanted – took her. He could do that, he was King. Got her pregnant – then had her husband killed to try and cover up the mess. I I I I I
But more often than not, the road David chose was the one he spells out in this Psalm.
“I do not concern myself with great matters, or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quietened my soul; like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me”.
This is a Psalm of battle. The battle you and I have to still our souls before God; to recognise when we’re behaving like an imperious I; to struggle and pray and talk our way to a better place and a better rhythm, where the I, I, I, I becomes I-Thou, I-Thou, I-Thou.
This Psalm reminds us that none of us are the centre of the universe. We are all of us beings in relation, and we must learn to give and take.
What would our families be like; what would our churches be like, if we had a little more “I-Thou” and a little less “I,I,I,I”. A little less defending of territory and a little more generosity towards others? A little less falling out and a little more forebearing?
Wouldn’t it be better, for everyone? Of course it would!
But is God going to step in and magic things better? Not according to David. This is a fight. We have to struggle to come to peace within ourselves and between ourselves. It doesn’t come naturally. We have to work at it. We have to overcome our instincts.
“I have stilled and quietened my soul” says David, because it wasn’t still – it wasn’t quiet. It was agitated and upset. And he struggled, and it was hard, but he found himself in a better place:
Like a weaned child is my soul within me. I'm growing up, in other words. I'm learning to rest in God.
If that’s the work that’s needing done in you this morning, David's encouraging you that it can be done; but he’s also telling you that nobody else can do it for you. “I have stilled and quietened MY soul”.
**********
Many vital life lessons from this shortest of Psalms.
Guard your heart – be careful what gets in there and takes root,
Because once it’s in there, it’ll affect what you see.
If you want to know peace, you have to struggle. You have to let God help you turn that I,I,I,I into I-Thou, I-Thou.
And in closing, let me make one last observation.
Verse 3 is almost a footnote to the Psalm and we’re not sure whether it belongs to David, or whether someone else added this to the end many years later.
It says “O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore”
And as I read through the Psalm I realised what a wonderful progression there is in these three short verses.
We start with the Imperious I, we progress to I-Thou, and we end with an all-embracing ‘we’. The Psalmist addresses Israel - the whole people – wishing, willing them to know God as that loving, patient, occasionally embattled mother, who knows what’s best and will struggle with us out of love until we bend to her wisdom.
That is the love in whose arms we rest this morning.
Thanks be to God
Let us pray
Almighty God,to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden;
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your name,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Help us still and quieten our souls before you.
Help us not to be enslaved to the tyranny of the imperious I,
But learn to make room for a Thou,
Be it you, or you as we find you in other people.
Help us know ourselves as people in relation;
Willing and able to give and take
For the good of all.
So hear our prayers,
Because we offer them all in the name of our friend and saviour, Jesus Christ,
Amen
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Psalm 130. Help
This sermonette was preached at our Harvest Sunday where we were taking part in the 90kg of Rice Challenge organised by Just Trading. If a congregation manages to sell 90kg of Malawian rice at a fair price, it allows a farmer to send one of his children to secondary school for a year. We had just a few bags left at the end of the day - well done folks!
There’s an old story about a man who gets caught up in a great flood, and ends up sitting on the roof of his house as the waters rise all around him.
As you do in those circumstances, he starts praying and asking God for help.
About half an hour later, a lifeboat comes roaring across the water, and stops beside the man’s house. And the lifeboatmen urge him to jump into the water and swim across. But he just refuses. “No – you’re ok. God’s going to save me”, he says. And though they try to talk him round, he just won’t be persuaded. And with so many other folk to rescue, the team eventually lose patience and zoom off to the next village.
So the man keeps praying. And an hour later, a helicopter appears, and the pilot spots him clinging on to the chimney, because the water’s right up over the roof now. And they lower a rope down to him, but he shouts up – “I’m all right – God’s going to save me”. And they try to reason with him, but he’s having none of it, and in the end they decide they have to leave him to his fate.
And you can guess what happens. Eventually he gets swept away and drowned. And he turns up in heaven with a bit of a face on him, as they say in Ireland. “Some God you are!” he says to the Almighty. “Where were you when I needed you?”.
“Well, I sent you a lifeboat and a helicopter”, says God. “What more did you want?”
We’ll return to that story shortly, but I was reminded of it this morning because today’s Psalm, Psalm 130, is all about someone who needs help.
“From the depths of my despair I call to you, Lord".
Despair is a powerful word.
I wonder how many of us know in our gut what it is to despair. I don’t doubt that a good number of us do.
A child who, despite your best efforts, goes off the rails.
A calamitous year or two on the farm that threatens to leave your business in ruins.
A diagnosis you weren’t reckoning on, and hadn’t prepared yourself for.
A situation that’s become virtually impossible to cope with.
Some of us know those kinds of stories, and the profound feelings of loss and worry and pain that go with them. We may have trailed those feelings behind us into church today, and it’s right that we should.
But even those of us who’ve been spared those kinds of trials know what it is to get to the end of ourselves. We know what it’s like when patience runs out, and options close down and there seems to be no way forward.
Where do we go, then?
Where do we go when there’s nowhere left to go?
The answers we get from our culture aren’t especially helpful. They usually involve anaesthetising the pain with something – could be Jack Daniels, could be television, could be a new project or a new hobby. Anything that helps us forget the problem long enough so we can keep up the pretence that we’re fine, when in truth we’re really pretty far from fine.
Anaesthetise, ignore, deny, cope. That’s how our culture disciples us to deal with our suffering.
The Psalmist offers us another way. There are two things you need to do, he says. Accept the reality of your suffering, but then accept the greater reality of God.
With those twin realities in mind, the Psalmist feels free to bellow out his pain and ask for help. He doesn’t hide it. But he knows that God is deeper than the depths he find himself in, and it’s that that gives him hope.
Years ago I travelled to Morocco with some friends and we were warned to be careful on the trains. Groups of young guys were mugging tourists leaving Tangiers to travel inland. We were warned to look out for 'the 4 S's' - snazzy shirts, cool shades, expensive shoes and dazzling smiles!
The five of us - two girls and three lads - caught the train and within minutes there were a group of guys sitting opposite us, a group of guys exhbiting all 4 S's and while being superficially friendly were clearly checking out us and our luggage with their eyes.
We got up, smiling, and moved down the carriage.
They followed.
This time they weren't so nice - they started to get abusive and threatening.
We got up again, and started moving to another carriage. I was the last one out, and one of the guys hissed at me - "I remember your face, I will follow you and I will f***ing kill you".
Welcome to Morocco!
Well, we did the things you do in those circumstances. We started shoving our money down our socks, hiding our passports and so on. And then, being a holy bunch, we prayed, individually, where we were sitting. And a strange thing happened. Independently, we all felt a deep sense of peace.
It wasn't a peace that nothing was going to happen. It was a peace that if anything did happen, God was bigger than the circumstances we would find ourselves in.
And though the guys came and checked out the carriage through the window, for some reason they didn't come in and bother us, though we were sitting ducks for the next three hours. We got off in Meknes, and went for pizza. And it was the best pizza I've ever tasted!
God was bigger than what we were facing. That's the lesson we learned on that train: the same lesson the Psalmist learned in his adversity.
“Israel, trust in the Lord, because his love is constant, and he is always willing to save”.
I don’t know how you are as you come to church this morning, but I do know that you need to be saved.
Not in the pulpit thumping way – at least, not just that.
Some of us need to be saved from ourselves and our self-destructive tendencies.
Some of us need to be saved from the things that weigh us down, or hold us back, or fill us with fear.
Some of us need to be saved from wrong ideas about God, or about the church.
Some of us need saved from the delusion that we’re quite all right, thank you very much, and we don’t really need a saviour.
The Psalmist’s word to us this morning is a good one, for those with ears to hear:
“Israel, trust in the Lord, because his love is constant, and he is always willing to save”.
But let me finish with one last thought.
God is always willing to save. But are we?
In the wee story I told at the beginning of the sermon, God wanted to save the man on the roof but he couldn’t because the man wasn’t listening properly.
But what if it were the ones supposed to be doing the saving who weren’t listening? What if the lifeboatmen missed the call to help because they were watching the football on Sky; or the helicopter pilot missed the flashing red light because he had his nose in his Kindle?
What if there were people out there who needed saving, but those charged with saving them didn’t hear, or worse still, didn’t care to hear?
One of the most awful facts to emerge in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster is that there was enough room in the lifeboats for many more people to be saved. Most of the fatalities were due to hypothermia from being in the freezing water, not drowning.
But as those poor souls bobbed up and down in the water, gasping, those with the power to do something stayed away and didn’t help. They kept the lifeboats at a safe distance where there was no risk of desperate people grabbing onto the sides and capsizing them. Some led the survivors in singing so they wouldn’t be able to hear the groans of those perishing in the water.
God is always willing to save. But are we?
I ask because there’s a man in Malawi at church today. A farmer. Like us he prays about the things that worry him – mostly his livelihood and his family. He urgently asks God for help, because his situation’s pretty helpless. He waits with hope for the dawn.
And God hears the prayer. And God wants to save him, in the midst of his troubles. And the miracle he sends is a very ordinary one. A group of folk come alongside the farmer and his neighbours and help them set up collectives. Together they stand up to the purchasers who’d exploited them as individuals. They get a fair price for their rice. It’s shipped to the UK and bagged here, then sent round the country ready for distribution to communities like ours; communities with the means, and the God-given responsibility, to help people just like him.
Today we’re not the man sitting on the roof as the flood waters rise. We’re the helicopter pilot or lifeboat crew. We’re the ones commissioned to do the rescuing. In God’s provision, the simple act of buying a bag of rice can be part of the answer to one man’s prayer.
God is always willing to save, says the Psalmist. That’s the promise of the gospel.
But are we willing to save? That’s the challenge of the gospel.
Thanks be to God for the promise and the challenge of his word on this Harvest Sunday
There’s an old story about a man who gets caught up in a great flood, and ends up sitting on the roof of his house as the waters rise all around him.
As you do in those circumstances, he starts praying and asking God for help.
About half an hour later, a lifeboat comes roaring across the water, and stops beside the man’s house. And the lifeboatmen urge him to jump into the water and swim across. But he just refuses. “No – you’re ok. God’s going to save me”, he says. And though they try to talk him round, he just won’t be persuaded. And with so many other folk to rescue, the team eventually lose patience and zoom off to the next village.
So the man keeps praying. And an hour later, a helicopter appears, and the pilot spots him clinging on to the chimney, because the water’s right up over the roof now. And they lower a rope down to him, but he shouts up – “I’m all right – God’s going to save me”. And they try to reason with him, but he’s having none of it, and in the end they decide they have to leave him to his fate.
And you can guess what happens. Eventually he gets swept away and drowned. And he turns up in heaven with a bit of a face on him, as they say in Ireland. “Some God you are!” he says to the Almighty. “Where were you when I needed you?”.
“Well, I sent you a lifeboat and a helicopter”, says God. “What more did you want?”
We’ll return to that story shortly, but I was reminded of it this morning because today’s Psalm, Psalm 130, is all about someone who needs help.
“From the depths of my despair I call to you, Lord".
Despair is a powerful word.
I wonder how many of us know in our gut what it is to despair. I don’t doubt that a good number of us do.
A child who, despite your best efforts, goes off the rails.
A calamitous year or two on the farm that threatens to leave your business in ruins.
A diagnosis you weren’t reckoning on, and hadn’t prepared yourself for.
A situation that’s become virtually impossible to cope with.
Some of us know those kinds of stories, and the profound feelings of loss and worry and pain that go with them. We may have trailed those feelings behind us into church today, and it’s right that we should.
But even those of us who’ve been spared those kinds of trials know what it is to get to the end of ourselves. We know what it’s like when patience runs out, and options close down and there seems to be no way forward.
Where do we go, then?
Where do we go when there’s nowhere left to go?
The answers we get from our culture aren’t especially helpful. They usually involve anaesthetising the pain with something – could be Jack Daniels, could be television, could be a new project or a new hobby. Anything that helps us forget the problem long enough so we can keep up the pretence that we’re fine, when in truth we’re really pretty far from fine.
Anaesthetise, ignore, deny, cope. That’s how our culture disciples us to deal with our suffering.
The Psalmist offers us another way. There are two things you need to do, he says. Accept the reality of your suffering, but then accept the greater reality of God.
With those twin realities in mind, the Psalmist feels free to bellow out his pain and ask for help. He doesn’t hide it. But he knows that God is deeper than the depths he find himself in, and it’s that that gives him hope.
Years ago I travelled to Morocco with some friends and we were warned to be careful on the trains. Groups of young guys were mugging tourists leaving Tangiers to travel inland. We were warned to look out for 'the 4 S's' - snazzy shirts, cool shades, expensive shoes and dazzling smiles!
The five of us - two girls and three lads - caught the train and within minutes there were a group of guys sitting opposite us, a group of guys exhbiting all 4 S's and while being superficially friendly were clearly checking out us and our luggage with their eyes.
We got up, smiling, and moved down the carriage.
They followed.
This time they weren't so nice - they started to get abusive and threatening.
We got up again, and started moving to another carriage. I was the last one out, and one of the guys hissed at me - "I remember your face, I will follow you and I will f***ing kill you".
Welcome to Morocco!
Well, we did the things you do in those circumstances. We started shoving our money down our socks, hiding our passports and so on. And then, being a holy bunch, we prayed, individually, where we were sitting. And a strange thing happened. Independently, we all felt a deep sense of peace.
It wasn't a peace that nothing was going to happen. It was a peace that if anything did happen, God was bigger than the circumstances we would find ourselves in.
And though the guys came and checked out the carriage through the window, for some reason they didn't come in and bother us, though we were sitting ducks for the next three hours. We got off in Meknes, and went for pizza. And it was the best pizza I've ever tasted!
God was bigger than what we were facing. That's the lesson we learned on that train: the same lesson the Psalmist learned in his adversity.
“Israel, trust in the Lord, because his love is constant, and he is always willing to save”.
I don’t know how you are as you come to church this morning, but I do know that you need to be saved.
Not in the pulpit thumping way – at least, not just that.
Some of us need to be saved from ourselves and our self-destructive tendencies.
Some of us need to be saved from the things that weigh us down, or hold us back, or fill us with fear.
Some of us need to be saved from wrong ideas about God, or about the church.
Some of us need saved from the delusion that we’re quite all right, thank you very much, and we don’t really need a saviour.
The Psalmist’s word to us this morning is a good one, for those with ears to hear:
“Israel, trust in the Lord, because his love is constant, and he is always willing to save”.
But let me finish with one last thought.
God is always willing to save. But are we?
In the wee story I told at the beginning of the sermon, God wanted to save the man on the roof but he couldn’t because the man wasn’t listening properly.
But what if it were the ones supposed to be doing the saving who weren’t listening? What if the lifeboatmen missed the call to help because they were watching the football on Sky; or the helicopter pilot missed the flashing red light because he had his nose in his Kindle?
What if there were people out there who needed saving, but those charged with saving them didn’t hear, or worse still, didn’t care to hear?
One of the most awful facts to emerge in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster is that there was enough room in the lifeboats for many more people to be saved. Most of the fatalities were due to hypothermia from being in the freezing water, not drowning.
But as those poor souls bobbed up and down in the water, gasping, those with the power to do something stayed away and didn’t help. They kept the lifeboats at a safe distance where there was no risk of desperate people grabbing onto the sides and capsizing them. Some led the survivors in singing so they wouldn’t be able to hear the groans of those perishing in the water.
God is always willing to save. But are we?
I ask because there’s a man in Malawi at church today. A farmer. Like us he prays about the things that worry him – mostly his livelihood and his family. He urgently asks God for help, because his situation’s pretty helpless. He waits with hope for the dawn.
And God hears the prayer. And God wants to save him, in the midst of his troubles. And the miracle he sends is a very ordinary one. A group of folk come alongside the farmer and his neighbours and help them set up collectives. Together they stand up to the purchasers who’d exploited them as individuals. They get a fair price for their rice. It’s shipped to the UK and bagged here, then sent round the country ready for distribution to communities like ours; communities with the means, and the God-given responsibility, to help people just like him.
Today we’re not the man sitting on the roof as the flood waters rise. We’re the helicopter pilot or lifeboat crew. We’re the ones commissioned to do the rescuing. In God’s provision, the simple act of buying a bag of rice can be part of the answer to one man’s prayer.
God is always willing to save, says the Psalmist. That’s the promise of the gospel.
But are we willing to save? That’s the challenge of the gospel.
Thanks be to God for the promise and the challenge of his word on this Harvest Sunday
Monday, 26 September 2011
Psalm 129. On the narrative you live by
Three stories with a common theme to kick us off this morning – one in the form of a video, one a story and one a photograph.
We'll start with the video first.
(At this point I showed a short clip of Fernando Torres missing an open goal against Manchester United the previous weekend - a glaring miss).
For all his ability, the only narrative that's playing out around Torres is 'here's the £50 million player who's turned into a flop'. He seems stuck in a story he can't get out of.
My second story comes from my visits down to our local nursing home - Balmedie House. There's a lovely lady there who I'll call Mary and she's at the stage in her life where she can't really remember things from day to day, and we have the same conversation every time I'm down there. She sees my collar and says "Are you a minister?" "Yes" I say. "Church of Scotland?". "Yes - that's right. Belhelvie's my parish". "Aw – I’m a Piscy" (Episcopalian!) she says, "but it’s nae sair!" (it's not a problem)
Why that memory, I wonder? Why ‘it’s nae sair?’ Did she feel awkward or different growing up a 'Piscy' if everyone else was Church of Sotland or RC?
My third story comes from a recent visit to Belfast with two colleagues. We did a bus tour of the city, and were taken into both the Loyalist Shankhill Road and the Republican Falls Road, and many of the gable ends of houses there are painted with cultural and paramilitary murals. We all agreed that the one below was the most striking of all. Black and white images show some of the atrocities perpetrated against the loyalist community over the years of the troubles, and questions how justice is - or isn't - being worked out in their favour.
Where are our inquiries. Where is our truth? Where is our justice?
Those words read like a howl of pain from a community that's trapped in the past and can't get past the things that have happened to it. It sounds like they are defined by the ways in which they have been wronged.
So those are our three stories. And the common theme is that in different ways, and to different degrees, all three describe people who are trapped in narratives they can’t seem to escape from. One story has become the dominant story that they are living out of.
One of the most perceptive and probing questions I think I’ve ever heard came from the lips of the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue. “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life and made it turn out the way it has?” he asked. There’s something to mull over by the fireside as the long dark evenings start to draw in! “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life?”
I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve never managed to get past the first two or three!
And for today, maybe it’s enough to simplify O’Donohue’s question and ask: “What one thought is shaping my life just now?”. What’s the story I’m living out of?
And the reason I ask is because it’s all too easy to get stuck in a bad narrative. One way of thinking, or of understanding ourselves and our situation, can end up swallowing all the others.
Our Psalm this morning starts with a bad narrative – one about pain and enemies and oppression.
“Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.
And if you know a wee bit of your Biblical History you’ll remember some of the stories. The way their baby sons were taken and slaughtered by their Egyptian taskmasters. The forced labour, bullied out of them by beatings and murders. The many battles they had to fight to finally enter the promised land, and the constant threat of war and invasion on their borders once they’d settled there.
Israel knew a thing or two about enemies and persecution.
And that thought makes me want to pause for a moment to give our struggles a little perspective.
I doubt that there’s anyone here who doesn’t have some difficult folk to contend with in life. We all have. And when you’re in the thick of those situations it can feel intolerable. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is – intolerable. By any rational measurement, things are genuinely awful for you. You need the help of friends and family, maybe even professionals, to help sort things out.
But much of the time, I think we only feel it’s intolerable. Examined in the cold light of day, the things we get so het up about don’t really amount to much, yet we get irate about them.
We magnify little things and get enraged by them; we read a significance into things that simply isn’t there. We do the exact opposite of what the Scriptures say and instead of dealing quickly with any anger we feel towards someone, we store it up and let it fester. And we end up making mountains out of molehills.
May God spare us from ever making real enemies – the kind that Israel had, and that some folk in today’s world still have. The kind who come knocking on your door at midnight to thrash you within an inch of your life and leave your back looking like a ploughed field.
Unless we’re very unlucky, in this part of the world I think the enemies people have most problems with are the ones within, rather than without.
Maybe it’s your pride that’s the enemy – that’s made life difficult for you. Maybe it’s your temper. Your rare ability to start a fight in an empty room.
Maybe it’s your stubbornness, or your low self-esteem, or your need to take over and be in control.
Maybe it’s what the apostle Paul calls the belly gods – the gut-level desires and hungers that take us over if we let them.
Any one of these, unchecked, can come to be the dominant narrative of our lives.
I knew a man in Glasgow years ago and it was a standing joke among his friends that if you hadn’t seen him for a while and you asked him how he was doing, he’d always say “Well, I’m alright NOW”!
He was caught in a bad narrative where he was always a victim. And nothing ever seemed to change.
Mike Yaconelli tells a story about a nine year old girl called Margaret who for some reason kept irking her teacher. And one day, in a rage, the teacher made her stand at the front of the class, and forced the other 25 girls to come up and write cruel things about her on the blackboard. Margaret is fat. Margaret is stupid. Margaret is a bad person.
It took that woman 40 years to escape the shadows that were cast over her soul that day. Those words became the narrative of her life.
It’s all too possible for one narrative to take you over.
How can you know if that’s happening to you?
The simplest answer to that, I think, is to listen to yourself. What do you talk about? What do you keep gravitating back to, in your speaking and your living and your thinking?
Are there times when you catch yourself halfway through a sentence thinking “oh no. here I go again”. That’s a strong clue that one narrative is beginning to take over.
But the good news today is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Psalm 129 begins with the Psalmist saying “Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.
The Psalmist is inviting Israel to tell a story. And you know as well as I do, that the only time you encourage someone to tell a story is when you already know there’s a good ending!
What does Israel say?
V2 – “Ever since I was young, my enemies have persecuted me cruelly.”
Those are the facts. The facts are a given. But it’s what you do in the face of those facts that matters.
“my enemies have persecuted me cruelly, but they have not overcome me. They cut deep wounds in my back and made it like a ploughed field. But the Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery”.
How do they get out from under this narrative of oppression? They pick up the strains of another, better narrative and they begin to live out of that.
How did Israel escape from slavery in Egypt? Moses – trembling, stuttering Moses, gathers his courage, makes his way back to Pharaoh and speaks the word ‘God’ into a situation that seemed godless. And as he does so, memories are stirred, and hope is kindled. There IS another story they can live out of – the God story.
Or think of David, who wrote many of the Psalms – hiding out in caves because the King he used to serve, King Saul. has turned on him for no reason and wants him dead. David could so easily have chosen the victim narrative, or the revenge narrative. They were a good fit in those circumstances. But he chose the God story. He chose the way of trust, patience, forgiveness and honour.
Or think of Jesus – living in a country under Roman occupation where it seemed that there were only two options: submission or waging a near-suicidal guerilla war. Again – the victim narrative or the revenge narrative looked like the only possibilities.
But Jesus showed how to live out the God-story. He embodied a third way, a defiant pacifism that forced the authorities to recognise the Jewish people as people.
When you study his teaching about turning the other cheek, and going the second mile you realise that these are deeply subversive practices. They force the Romans to see the Jews as people – people who refuse to accept the narrative role they’re expected to play, because they have a better story they’re living out of. One that tells them that first and foremost they’re not Roman subjects but the beloved children of God.
The Psalmist has a good story to tell this morning
The enemy oppressed. But they have not overcome.
The Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery.
I wonder what oppresses in your life just now?
Time? Work? Responsibility? Something to do with how you perceive yourself? Someone who’s making life difficult? We all have our stories of oppression.
But the good news today is that they needn’t be the dominant narrative of our lives.
The Lord , the righteous one, can set you free. says the Psalmist.
And he will do, if we set ourselves to listening for the strains of his story.
As I was thinking about this morning, I remembered a movie I haven’t seen for absolutely ages - Shirley Valentine.
Shirley’s a middle aged housewife, living out of a narrative she’s grown tired of. Her husband Joe and her daughter take her completely for granted, and whatever spark and individuality she once had has been all but extinguished by dull routine. She’s unhappy, but she’s more or less resigned to how things are.
And then her friend wins a competition where the first prize is a trip for two to Greece, and she offers to take Shirley with her. It sounds like an impossiblilty - Joe would never allow it. But a little part of her begins to dream.
She puts a brightly coloured poster of Greece on her pantry door, and it lights up her drab kitchen. She looks at it all the time, wondering what it would be like to go there, and eat different food and meet different people, and drink a cold glass of wine sitting beside the sea in the evening sunlight.
And then something happens that makes her decide that that’s exactly what she’s going to do. Thursday night is always steak night in their house, but Joe freaks out when she dares to cook him egg and chips for a change and he literally throws it back in her lap.
Shirley’s had enough. She goes to Greece with her friend, and falls in love all over again – not so much with the place, or even the local womaniser she has a dalliance with. She falls in love with life again, and with being Shirley Valentine.
The movie ends with Joe, her husband, walking stiffly down to the harbour in his black suit, shirt and tie, and walking right past Shirley as she sits, having that glass of wine by the sea. He doesn’t even recognise her any more. It’s only when she speaks that he realises who she is. And the film ends with him, bewildered at the change in her, joining her for a drink by the sea.
We don’t know how things will pan out, but we know that for Shirley, and we hope for Joe, things will end well because she’s found a better narrative to live out of.
And the image I want to leave you with this morning, is that poster of Greece on Shirley’s pantry door. Something that pointed beyond the drab or difficult now to something better.
There are times when I feel like a broken record. Sometimes I feel like all I do in my preaching is encourage you to read and reflect and pray. But I want you to realise that’s not because God demands it of you. It’s not meant to be a dull duty, like washing up or cooking egg and chips.
For a believer, prayer and reading and reflection are like the poster of Greece, reminding us that there are other, better stories to live by. They open up possibilities; they make us realise that there are other ways to be, And in the humdrum of our everyday lives, with their burdens and their pressures, that’s a message that all of us need to hear again and again and again.
I began this week feeling pressurised by the weight of things not done. And when I feel that pressure, my regular temptation is to get the head down and crack on with it, prayerlessly and grumpily. I live too much of my life out of that narrative.
But this week something, most likely the Holy Spirit, nagged me to sit down and keep company with God before I began to do anything. So I did. And I read these words in a little book I use when I come to pray:
“It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices. We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen”.
That metaphorical glance at the poster was enough to remind me to live out of God’s story that day, and not my own. To unclench my hands a little and wait for the wonder.
I’ll probably have to learn the same lesson again this week, and the week after and the week after that but thank God he never tires of drawing us into his story and setting us free.
We'll start with the video first.
(At this point I showed a short clip of Fernando Torres missing an open goal against Manchester United the previous weekend - a glaring miss).
For all his ability, the only narrative that's playing out around Torres is 'here's the £50 million player who's turned into a flop'. He seems stuck in a story he can't get out of.
My second story comes from my visits down to our local nursing home - Balmedie House. There's a lovely lady there who I'll call Mary and she's at the stage in her life where she can't really remember things from day to day, and we have the same conversation every time I'm down there. She sees my collar and says "Are you a minister?" "Yes" I say. "Church of Scotland?". "Yes - that's right. Belhelvie's my parish". "Aw – I’m a Piscy" (Episcopalian!) she says, "but it’s nae sair!" (it's not a problem)
Why that memory, I wonder? Why ‘it’s nae sair?’ Did she feel awkward or different growing up a 'Piscy' if everyone else was Church of Sotland or RC?
My third story comes from a recent visit to Belfast with two colleagues. We did a bus tour of the city, and were taken into both the Loyalist Shankhill Road and the Republican Falls Road, and many of the gable ends of houses there are painted with cultural and paramilitary murals. We all agreed that the one below was the most striking of all. Black and white images show some of the atrocities perpetrated against the loyalist community over the years of the troubles, and questions how justice is - or isn't - being worked out in their favour.
Where are our inquiries. Where is our truth? Where is our justice?
Those words read like a howl of pain from a community that's trapped in the past and can't get past the things that have happened to it. It sounds like they are defined by the ways in which they have been wronged.
So those are our three stories. And the common theme is that in different ways, and to different degrees, all three describe people who are trapped in narratives they can’t seem to escape from. One story has become the dominant story that they are living out of.
One of the most perceptive and probing questions I think I’ve ever heard came from the lips of the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue. “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life and made it turn out the way it has?” he asked. There’s something to mull over by the fireside as the long dark evenings start to draw in! “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life?”
I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve never managed to get past the first two or three!
And for today, maybe it’s enough to simplify O’Donohue’s question and ask: “What one thought is shaping my life just now?”. What’s the story I’m living out of?
And the reason I ask is because it’s all too easy to get stuck in a bad narrative. One way of thinking, or of understanding ourselves and our situation, can end up swallowing all the others.
Our Psalm this morning starts with a bad narrative – one about pain and enemies and oppression.
“Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.
And if you know a wee bit of your Biblical History you’ll remember some of the stories. The way their baby sons were taken and slaughtered by their Egyptian taskmasters. The forced labour, bullied out of them by beatings and murders. The many battles they had to fight to finally enter the promised land, and the constant threat of war and invasion on their borders once they’d settled there.
Israel knew a thing or two about enemies and persecution.
And that thought makes me want to pause for a moment to give our struggles a little perspective.
I doubt that there’s anyone here who doesn’t have some difficult folk to contend with in life. We all have. And when you’re in the thick of those situations it can feel intolerable. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is – intolerable. By any rational measurement, things are genuinely awful for you. You need the help of friends and family, maybe even professionals, to help sort things out.
But much of the time, I think we only feel it’s intolerable. Examined in the cold light of day, the things we get so het up about don’t really amount to much, yet we get irate about them.
We magnify little things and get enraged by them; we read a significance into things that simply isn’t there. We do the exact opposite of what the Scriptures say and instead of dealing quickly with any anger we feel towards someone, we store it up and let it fester. And we end up making mountains out of molehills.
May God spare us from ever making real enemies – the kind that Israel had, and that some folk in today’s world still have. The kind who come knocking on your door at midnight to thrash you within an inch of your life and leave your back looking like a ploughed field.
Unless we’re very unlucky, in this part of the world I think the enemies people have most problems with are the ones within, rather than without.
Maybe it’s your pride that’s the enemy – that’s made life difficult for you. Maybe it’s your temper. Your rare ability to start a fight in an empty room.
Maybe it’s your stubbornness, or your low self-esteem, or your need to take over and be in control.
Maybe it’s what the apostle Paul calls the belly gods – the gut-level desires and hungers that take us over if we let them.
Any one of these, unchecked, can come to be the dominant narrative of our lives.
I knew a man in Glasgow years ago and it was a standing joke among his friends that if you hadn’t seen him for a while and you asked him how he was doing, he’d always say “Well, I’m alright NOW”!
He was caught in a bad narrative where he was always a victim. And nothing ever seemed to change.
Mike Yaconelli tells a story about a nine year old girl called Margaret who for some reason kept irking her teacher. And one day, in a rage, the teacher made her stand at the front of the class, and forced the other 25 girls to come up and write cruel things about her on the blackboard. Margaret is fat. Margaret is stupid. Margaret is a bad person.
It took that woman 40 years to escape the shadows that were cast over her soul that day. Those words became the narrative of her life.
It’s all too possible for one narrative to take you over.
How can you know if that’s happening to you?
The simplest answer to that, I think, is to listen to yourself. What do you talk about? What do you keep gravitating back to, in your speaking and your living and your thinking?
Are there times when you catch yourself halfway through a sentence thinking “oh no. here I go again”. That’s a strong clue that one narrative is beginning to take over.
But the good news today is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Psalm 129 begins with the Psalmist saying “Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.
The Psalmist is inviting Israel to tell a story. And you know as well as I do, that the only time you encourage someone to tell a story is when you already know there’s a good ending!
What does Israel say?
V2 – “Ever since I was young, my enemies have persecuted me cruelly.”
Those are the facts. The facts are a given. But it’s what you do in the face of those facts that matters.
“my enemies have persecuted me cruelly, but they have not overcome me. They cut deep wounds in my back and made it like a ploughed field. But the Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery”.
How do they get out from under this narrative of oppression? They pick up the strains of another, better narrative and they begin to live out of that.
How did Israel escape from slavery in Egypt? Moses – trembling, stuttering Moses, gathers his courage, makes his way back to Pharaoh and speaks the word ‘God’ into a situation that seemed godless. And as he does so, memories are stirred, and hope is kindled. There IS another story they can live out of – the God story.
Or think of David, who wrote many of the Psalms – hiding out in caves because the King he used to serve, King Saul. has turned on him for no reason and wants him dead. David could so easily have chosen the victim narrative, or the revenge narrative. They were a good fit in those circumstances. But he chose the God story. He chose the way of trust, patience, forgiveness and honour.
Or think of Jesus – living in a country under Roman occupation where it seemed that there were only two options: submission or waging a near-suicidal guerilla war. Again – the victim narrative or the revenge narrative looked like the only possibilities.
But Jesus showed how to live out the God-story. He embodied a third way, a defiant pacifism that forced the authorities to recognise the Jewish people as people.
When you study his teaching about turning the other cheek, and going the second mile you realise that these are deeply subversive practices. They force the Romans to see the Jews as people – people who refuse to accept the narrative role they’re expected to play, because they have a better story they’re living out of. One that tells them that first and foremost they’re not Roman subjects but the beloved children of God.
The Psalmist has a good story to tell this morning
The enemy oppressed. But they have not overcome.
The Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery.
I wonder what oppresses in your life just now?
Time? Work? Responsibility? Something to do with how you perceive yourself? Someone who’s making life difficult? We all have our stories of oppression.
But the good news today is that they needn’t be the dominant narrative of our lives.
The Lord , the righteous one, can set you free. says the Psalmist.
And he will do, if we set ourselves to listening for the strains of his story.
As I was thinking about this morning, I remembered a movie I haven’t seen for absolutely ages - Shirley Valentine.
Shirley’s a middle aged housewife, living out of a narrative she’s grown tired of. Her husband Joe and her daughter take her completely for granted, and whatever spark and individuality she once had has been all but extinguished by dull routine. She’s unhappy, but she’s more or less resigned to how things are.
And then her friend wins a competition where the first prize is a trip for two to Greece, and she offers to take Shirley with her. It sounds like an impossiblilty - Joe would never allow it. But a little part of her begins to dream.
She puts a brightly coloured poster of Greece on her pantry door, and it lights up her drab kitchen. She looks at it all the time, wondering what it would be like to go there, and eat different food and meet different people, and drink a cold glass of wine sitting beside the sea in the evening sunlight.
And then something happens that makes her decide that that’s exactly what she’s going to do. Thursday night is always steak night in their house, but Joe freaks out when she dares to cook him egg and chips for a change and he literally throws it back in her lap.
Shirley’s had enough. She goes to Greece with her friend, and falls in love all over again – not so much with the place, or even the local womaniser she has a dalliance with. She falls in love with life again, and with being Shirley Valentine.
The movie ends with Joe, her husband, walking stiffly down to the harbour in his black suit, shirt and tie, and walking right past Shirley as she sits, having that glass of wine by the sea. He doesn’t even recognise her any more. It’s only when she speaks that he realises who she is. And the film ends with him, bewildered at the change in her, joining her for a drink by the sea.
We don’t know how things will pan out, but we know that for Shirley, and we hope for Joe, things will end well because she’s found a better narrative to live out of.
And the image I want to leave you with this morning, is that poster of Greece on Shirley’s pantry door. Something that pointed beyond the drab or difficult now to something better.
There are times when I feel like a broken record. Sometimes I feel like all I do in my preaching is encourage you to read and reflect and pray. But I want you to realise that’s not because God demands it of you. It’s not meant to be a dull duty, like washing up or cooking egg and chips.
For a believer, prayer and reading and reflection are like the poster of Greece, reminding us that there are other, better stories to live by. They open up possibilities; they make us realise that there are other ways to be, And in the humdrum of our everyday lives, with their burdens and their pressures, that’s a message that all of us need to hear again and again and again.
I began this week feeling pressurised by the weight of things not done. And when I feel that pressure, my regular temptation is to get the head down and crack on with it, prayerlessly and grumpily. I live too much of my life out of that narrative.
But this week something, most likely the Holy Spirit, nagged me to sit down and keep company with God before I began to do anything. So I did. And I read these words in a little book I use when I come to pray:
“It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices. We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen”.
That metaphorical glance at the poster was enough to remind me to live out of God’s story that day, and not my own. To unclench my hands a little and wait for the wonder.
I’ll probably have to learn the same lesson again this week, and the week after and the week after that but thank God he never tires of drawing us into his story and setting us free.
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