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)

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. 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

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