It would be unfair of me to ask you what I was preaching on two years ago. To be honest, I don’t think I could remember what I was preaching on two years ago if it weren’t for the blog!
But those of you with good memories will remember that we started looking at the Psalms of the Ascent - 15 Psalms numbered 120-134, which were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great feasts of their faith: Passover in spring, Pentecost in summer and Tabernacles in early autumn.
These gathering were a huge event in the lives of the Jewish community – several days of feasting and worship and fellowship – and the songs they sang as they travelled dealt with the stuff of life, lived under the rule of God.
We left off at Ps 127 and between now and Remembrance Sunday we’re going to be looking at the remaining 7 Psalms, beginning today with Psalm 128.
And as I prepared for today I remembered something from two years ago – I always find it really hard to get past the first couple of verses!
“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands” says the Psalmist
Does that sound familiar? Given that the Hebrew word esher also means ‘blessed’ it might remind you of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 which we studied last year. And you’ll remember from that series that the Beatitudes aren’t pithy good advice – they’re a declaration of how things are. The Psalmist isn’t offering advice here – he’s saying: “This is how things are’ – if you obey God, and you live by God’s commands you will experience blessing.
So it’s a promise – but the problem is, the promise only holds for those who……. obey.
I wonder what your gut reaction is to that word ‘obey’?
I know that I don’t like it. I found myself reacting to it, and for a preacher that’s always sign that there’s something there worth exploring.
So I started to dig down into my associations around that word ‘obey’. And the first thing that came to mind was Barbara Woodhouse!
For those of you under 30, for whom that cultural reference will mean nothing, Barbara Woodhouse was a bossy, matriarchal figure who appeared on our screens in the early 1980’s and had a rare ability to train dogs and get them doing what she wanted.
Her signature move was to bark ‘sit’ at them, at the same time as making a sharp hand gesture, and amazingly the dogs seemed to respond!
And part of me associates ‘obedience’ with that kind of image. Obedience implies a definite pecking order, and I don’t like where I am in that pecking order. I want to be the one giving the commands, not taking them. And I don’t think I’m alone in that!
I wonder how many married women here took vows promising to obey your husbands?! How are you doing with those vows, I wonder. I can tell you now, your daughters and grand-daughters won’t be taking vows in those terms!
And men – why is it we find it so hard to ask for directions when we’re lost? When the flat pack furniture arrives, why are we so reluctant to read the instructions?
The answer is, we don’t like being subordinate – not even to a stranger we’ll never meet again, or to a piece of paper!
Implicit in notion of our obeying is the understanding that we’re not in charge, and that doesn’t sit easily with our egos.
We like being masters of our own destiny and we don’t like being told what to do, even if it’s God who’s doing the telling.
So that’s the first thing to note from Psalm 128: We have this resistance within us to obedience; a resistance that’s largely to do with our egos.
But there are times in life when we do find ourselves being obedient.
And broadly speaking, those times fall into three categories – Times when we have to be obedient, times when we’re afraid not to be obedient, and - more positively – times when we want to be obedient.
Sometimes we have to obey people for no other reason than that they’re above us in the pecking order.
They’re the boss and we’re the worker, They’re the teacher and we’re the pupil. They’re the drill sergeant and we’re the private out square-bashing.
They have a status to which we have to defer. They may not use it well, they may not even deserve it! But the rules of the game say that within reason we have to do what they ask us to do.
We obey because we have to.
Then secondly there are times when we obey because we’re scared of what will happen if we don’t.
Ever noticed how all the traffic on the A90 suddenly slows down to a sedate, law-abiding 65mph when we spot a police car cruising up ahead?
If you were standing at the cashpoint one evening and felt a knife pushed up against your ribs, would you think twice when the mugger told you to hand over your money?
And if the flight attendant announces that it’s time to buckle your seatbelt and adopt the brace position, you don’t argue with her. You just do what she says.
We readily obey when we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t obey.
But I think the third instance of obedience is the most interesting, Sometimes in life we obey because we want to.
We see something in the other that inspires us because of its beauty or its skill, or its accomplishment. And we want to be like that.
The way they handled that situation; or danced so effortlessly; or filled the room with music; or swung that golf club, or ploughed that field; or showed such courage.
We want to be like them, and so we apprentice ourselves to them. We readily accept everything they’re ready to offer by way of instruction because we’ve seen something of the art in what they do and we want it for ourselves.
Eugene Peterson, who I often quote, was the son of a butcher, and from an early age he was raised to work in his father’s shop, learning at the elbow of men who had been dealing with meat all their lives.
He says “The day I was trusted with a knife, and taught to respect it and keep it sharp, I knew adult hood was just around the corner. “That knife has a will of its own” old Eddie Norcrist, one of my dad’s butchers, used to say to me. “Get to know your knife”. If I cut myself, he would blame me, not for carelessness but for ignorance – I didn’t ‘know’ my knife.
(Under their instruction) I also learned that a beef carcass has a will of its own – it’s not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.
Not so much by words but by example, I internalised a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, or a soul. But when the work is done well, there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand – a cultivation of what I would later learn to call humility. It is a noticeable feature in all skilled workers – woodworkers, potters, poets, pray-ers, and pastors. I learned it in the butcher shop.
What Peterson’s just described to you is a brilliant description of discipleship. The apprentice, the disciple, willingly sets ego to the side so they can learn from someone who knows more and knows better than they do. They accept their status and become teachable because they want to have what the master has. They obey because they want to.
So to summarise, there are three reasons people like us, people with egos, obey. We obey because we have to, because we’re scared not to, or because we want to.
“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands”.
To the extent that you are, why are you obeying God this morning?
Is it out of duty? Do you feel that you have to for some reason?
Is it out of fear? Do you worry about what will happen to you if you don’t?
Or is it because you want to? Because you’ve come to understand that everything you love about life, everything that makes your soul sing and your mind marvel can be traced back to him. You stumble and fall and mess up and start again but always this thing’s ahead of you – this deep truth that somehow, life at its best, is all about him.
I love those opening exchanges in John’s gospel we heard earlier, and especially Jesus’ opening gambit to these two guys who are doing a not-very-good job of trying to follow him.
“What are you looking for?” he asks them. And you know, I don’t think they had much of a clue how to answer that. They just knew that there was something about this man that made them want to be with him. The best they can offer by way of a reply is pretty pathetic. “Where do you live, Rabbi?”.
“Come and see” he answers kindly. And they do. And so begins a lifetime of discipleship.
Over the years I’ve come to believe that God wants our obedience not for his sake, but for ours. He wants to teach us how to live; and to bless us in our living. But he can’t until we’ve signed on as a disciple - a lifelong learner.
The days of the week are your school. The Holy Spirit is your tutor; the Bible is your source text. The assigned task for each day is to learn how to live well and faithfully in this place and with these people. This workplace, these colleagues, this family, these neighbours, this church.
That situation that could be so much better.
That criticism that came out of nowhere
That need that suddenly became apparent
That task that’s needing some attention
That person who’s needing some help
This is the raw material God gets us to work on – Peterson’s slab of meat, or plank of mahogany or lump of clay. This is the stuff you have to work with each day. How will you work with it?
This is more than Sunday mornings, folks. This is life lived in apprenticeship to the Holy Spirit of God. Discipleship, by another name.
The promise of today’s Psalm is that if we apprentice ourselves to God, we will find blessing.
Our homes, our family life, our relationships will become places where we know the peace and presence of God, even in hard times.
It comes at the cost of obedience. But for a disciple, that’s a small price to pay.
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