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July 21 - August 18, 2019
Hilarity is integral to Christian pilgrimage. There is no question that being a Christian involves us in many sorrows, many struggles, sober hours of repentance and meditation. But there isn’t the slightest suggestion in Scripture that grim resignation is characteristic of Christian character. How could it be when God is victor? The gospel is like a nail: the harder you hit it, the deeper in it goes. The Balaam story is good protection against the doomsday people when they get too assertive. Laugh at the devil and he will flee from you.
our fallen state we somehow imagine God is a being that can be called into action to denounce, to put down, whatever displeases or inconveniences us. We are disappointed, frustrated, and blocked by the people God has put in our lives. And we stupidly think we can get God to deal with them in a way that lets us indulge ourselves and then selfishly go on our way without the inconvenience of accepting and loving them.
And we say, “Sure, Balak, what did you expect? Blessing is God’s main business.” Amen.
After long training (forty years!) the people are addressed by Moses as if they are capable of doing what they have been created and saved to do: live as the people of God in the Promised Land of God. Live holy lives. Live the creation-salvation revolution. It has taken them a long time to grow up. They are now poised at the threshold of maturity and called to love. Love is our most mature act as human beings. Both statistically and sermonically, the word love holds a prominent place in Deuteronomy. Does that surprise you?
In one sense the revolutionary reform didn’t last long, thirteen years to be exact. Then Egypt and Babylon got rid of Assyria (a good thing) but also conquered Judah (not a good thing). Babylon soon hauled Judah off into exile. But in another sense the reform that Josiah led and Jeremiah preached formed a people of God that not only survived a massive political defeat, enslavement, and exile but actually flourished. The Josianic reform, using Deuteronomy as its text, formed (re-formed) God’s people. I was in the early years of being a pastor when I learned this story of the discovery of
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Life was at stake: their lives, their souls, their souls in community. People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely but still live badly: live anemically, live individualistically self-enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.
This sermon does what all sermons are intended to do: takes God’s words, written and spoken in the past; takes the human experience, ancestral and personal, of the listening congregation; and then reproduces the words and experience as a single event right now, in this present moment. A sermon changes words about God into words from God. It takes what we have heard or read of God and God’s ways and turns them into a personal proclamation of God’s good news. A sermon changes water into wine. A sermon changes bread nouns and wine verbs into the body and blood of Christ. A sermon makes personal
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The text of Psalms is almost entirely this kind of language: poetry. Knowing this, we will not be looking here primarily for information, for ideas about God or for direction in moral conduct. We will expect, rather, to find the experience of being human before God, exposed and sharpened. Praying in the company of David, we develop a praying imagination.
Our habit is to talk about God, not to him. We love discussing God. The psalms resist these discussions. They are not provided to teach us about God but to train us in responding to him. This is poetry that dives beneath the surface of prose and pretense straight into the depths. We are more comfortable with prose, the laid-back language of our arm’s-length discourse. But prayer requires that we deal with God, this God who is determined about nothing less than the total renovation of our lives. We would rather have a religious bull session. But to acquire a disposition to listen and submit to
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stock answers are not prescribed. There is no verse-by-verse correspondence between, say, Psalm 19 and Genesis 19. The editorial arrangement does not give us a phrase book of rote answers. What we have, rather, is an immersion in language adequate to the dialogue. We acquire facility in personal language that is accurately responsive out of our changing lives and growing levels of faith to what God speaks to us in Scripture and in Christ. We need a vocabulary and syntax sufficiently personal and adequately wide ranging to answer everything that God says.
And then Jesus shows up. Peter is the first to identify Jesus as Messiah (“You are the Christ,” Matthew 16:16). But there is a problem. This Jesus that Peter identifies as Messiah is totally at odds with the stereotypes: a king without an army, a king without a sword, a king who ends up being murdered without angel intervention. And also a priest without robes, a priest who mingles with the poor and outsiders, a priest who touches lepers and heals disreputable women, a priest who disregards Sabbath rules, a priest who associates with politically suspect people.
“Yahweh says…” “Yahweh has sworn…” And the person that Yahweh spoke to both times is the Lord, whom the early Christians now recognized as Messiah, namely, Jesus. Those two sentences provide the structure of the psalm: God the Father speaking to God the Son. They are the reason for the prominence of Psalm 110 in the early Christian community. These people were interested above all in hearing what God had to say to Jesus. Their thirst for the good news was insatiable. Their appetite for the Word of God was bottomless.
We come to the Bible as consumers, rummaging through texts to find something at a bargain. We come to worship as gourmets of the emotional, thinking that the numinous might provide a nice addition to sunsets and symphonies. We read “You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day” (Psalm 91:5) and are tranquilized. We read “He does not deal with us according to our sins” (103:10) and decide we have probably been too hard on ourselves. Then we read “The LORD says…, The LORD has sworn…” and reach for the newspaper to find out how the stock market is doing.
The preference is definitive. No other psalm comes close. The community of first-century Christians pondered, discussed, memorized, and meditated on Psalm 110. It shaped their identity as a people of God who listened to the Word of God. It is an extremely important and strategic psalm, skillfully and vigorously composed, and sets down an essential, foundational word of God for all who live by faith in Jesus Christ.
In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, all the scattered materials of truth and revelation were assembled into an organic whole, a stunning act of redemption. Messiah is put together out of the fragmented functions of king and priest, the work of ruling and the work of saving. The king represented God’s power to rule, to shape and guide life. The priest represented God’s power to renew, to forgive and invigorate life. The king, associated with the palace, operated in the external realm of politics; the priest, associated with the temple, operated in the inner world of the spirit. The
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King and priest are large, dominating metaphors. Mary’s womb brings something quite different: unspoiled intimacy and tenderness. The splendor of a king and the holiness of a priest are now fused in the early morning birth of a child to be loved and cherished.
As such, this succinct poem-prayer entered the imaginations of the first Christians, radically reimaging Messiah in a fusion of kingly splendor, priestly holiness, and, from Mary’s womb, dew. Jesus.
Charity was asking for a relationship with her grandmother in which God is not depersonalized into god-talk but is a personal presence alive in their dailiness, a dailiness in which God and life are organically one in both speech and action.
The phrase “land of the living” is my choice for naming this world we live in. For the Christian life is life, life, and more life. Following Jesus is life, life, and more life. We serve a living Savior: Christ is risen. Jesus said as much: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10, ESV). Life, created and redeemed by Christ, is not just one item among others. It is an expansive country that we inhabit. Everywhere we look in the creation, everything we read in our Scriptures, everything we hear in the company of saints is about life.
Our text is embedded in Psalm 116, a prayer, that is, language addressed to God: “I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my supplications” (verse 1). Prayer is speech at its most alive. The breath that is breathed into us by God we breathe back to God. When we pray, we are using language close to the source of language. In our baptismal identity we habituate ourselves to the language native to the country of salvation, the land of the living.
We live in a culture that knows little or nothing of a life that listens and waits, a life that attends and adores. What makes things even more difficult, we live in a church that knows even less of this life that makes friends with silence, a life that leaves time and space for the Holy Spirit to breathe into our hourglass lives and form a mature Christ life. The consequences are alarming as our great Christian heritage becomes more superficial by the decade, shallow and trivialized, noisy and glitzy with god-talk.
Beauty: splendor, grandeur, adornment. Life—core existence—spills over the containers of mere survival or utility. There is something more going on in this world than just getting across the street. And holiness: an interior fire, a passion for living in and for God, a capacity for exuberance in the presence of God.
Beauty is the outside and holiness the inside of what is essentially the same thing: life full and vibrant, life God created and God blessed, life here and now.
Ellen Glasgow’s wonderful line in her autobiography where she described her father, a Presbyterian elder full of rectitude and rigid with duty: “He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life…never committed a pleasure.”
holiness is in wild and furious opposition to all such banality and blandness. We are introduced to it through the stories of the burning bush in Midian, the mountain on fire at Sinai, the smoke- and angel-filled temple in Jerusalem. We find ourselves in the presence of God alive, with life far in excess of anything we imagined. This God-life cannot be domesticated or used; it can only be entered into on its own terms. Moses and Isaiah walked out of those stories on fire themselves, energized for lifelong, life-giving vocations. Holiness did not make God smaller so they could use God in
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life, which is characterized by its modifier holiness as God’s life and God-derived life, lavish and exuberant, beyond domestication and inaccessible to control, is mediated to us in beauty. Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.
We need to rub our noses in the stuff of this world, inhale its fragrance, press our hands into the clay, listen to the songs and stories. God is out recruiting every writer, artist, musician, pastor, child, and parent he can find to help us do just that so we can worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over many waters. (verse 3, ESV)
In the Hebrew imagination, the waters were chaos, the uncontrollable and uncontrolled, the home of Leviathan, anticreation. But when the voice of the Lord thunders over the waters, chaos becomes subject to creation: life, an allusion to Genesis 1, our first glimpse of the beauty of holiness. Storms are splendid, beautiful, awesome. God is on display performing the beauty of holiness, and we have a ringside seat. The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars; the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox. (verses 5–6, ESV)
The voice of the LORD makes the oaks to shake*4 and strips the forest bare, and in his temple all cry, “Glory!” (verse 9, ESV)
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let thy glory be over all the earth! (verse 5) And then without warning one of these diesel-fueled apocalyptic machines would be upon me, and my prayer would shift gears to That thy beloved may be delivered, give help by thy right hand, and answer me! (verse 6)
I had learned to walk and talk, play and go to school, make friends and work, sin and repent, read and pray and love on holy ground. God had provided this land not primarily for farming and mining and logging but for salvation. A holy land requires the proper names to evoke its character. Numbers don’t do it.
So what do I do with Edom? I ask God to bring me to Edom—the place, the person fortified against God: Who will bring me to the fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom? God will. And God does. Over and over and over again. The person, the task, the threat, the frustration, the institution, the circumstance that my first impulse is to curse—you stupid Edomite!—becomes, through the wonderful praying of Psalm 108, the occasion for going beyond my strength or understanding or inclination to search out the purposes of God where God is working them out, not where I am cozily domesticating them. For
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Scripture is the Word of God understood, comprehended, honored. Prayer is the Word of God assimilated, absorbed, lived. Scripture without prayer has no soul; prayer without Scripture has no substance. What I hope to develop in our congregation is a fusion of the two: Scripture-prayer or prayer-Scripture. What is the use of knowing Scripture if you aren’t living it? What is the use of praying if you don’t know to whom you are praying?
When Israel went forth from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea looked and fled, Jordan turned back. The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs. What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back? O mountains, that you skip like rams? O hills, like lambs? Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the LORD, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water. (Psalm 114:1–8)
but this is something about God, not nature, that is being prayed. Psalmists praise God’s act of creation (Psalm 33); express awe at his incredible condescension including humans in a responsible position (Psalm 8); juxtapose the twin glories of sky and Scripture in revealing God’s design (Psalm 19); marvel at the intricate interrelations of light, wind, clouds, oceans, springs, birds, fish, storks, badgers, people at work, and people at praise (Psalm 104). But these psalms are never about nature; always they are about God.
When Israel went forth from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The most unobtrusive words in these lines, the pronouns, are the very ones that turn out to be most important: his sanctuary and his dominion, that is, God’s sanctuary and God’s dominion.
The formative experience for Israel’s identity, the Exodus, is not arrogantly held up as a nationalist banner behind which they can march, boasting of their superiority. What is expressed instead is unpretentious submission to God’s gracious rule. Geography (Judah) becomes liturgy (sanctuary). A piece of land in the ancient Middle East becomes an arena in which the divine action is played out.
God’s presence and God’s action. History and geography are gathered into worship, into prayer.
Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the LORD, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.
“Tremble” here reaches for the transcendental: awed respect, reverent humility. Promethean man trembles before neither earth nor altar; he takes charge. Technological woman trembles before neither forest nor angel host; she operates her slide rule with steady hands. People at prayer tremble, along with the whole creation that “waits with eager longing” (Romans 8:19) and in hopeful adoration before the mystery of creation and salvation that “in everything God works for good” (Romans 8:28).
The moment we understand that, playfulness is born. Prayer that enters into relationship with earth and sky, sea and mountain plays. It skips and dances. We do not live in an ironclad universe of cause and effect. In the presence of the God of Jacob, there is life that is beyond prediction. There is freedom to change, to become more than we were in the presence of the God who “turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.”
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” This is the fugitive speaking. A man threatened by his past, a man menaced by the curse of blood revenge, is welcomed into the Shepherd’s tent, and there, “in the presence of my enemies,” he is served a meal. In the Shepherd’s tent he is safe.
Psalm 23 is a convincing witness that God is our Shepherd, that God is the Shepherd who preserves us, accompanies us, and rules us. He doesn’t just create us and turn us loose to make the best we can of it. He doesn’t just let us fend for ourselves until we die and are hauled before the judgment seat for an accounting of our conduct. He is the Shepherd who guides us in our wanderings and sustains us in our fugitive lives.
“We need not expect turns and events which have nothing to do with His lordship and are not directly in some sense acts of His lordship. This Lord is never absent, passive, non-responsible or impotent, but always present, active, responsible and omnipotent. He is never dead, but always living; never sleeping, but always awake; never uninterested, but always concerned; never merely waiting in any respect, but even where He seems to wait, even where He permits, always holding the initiative. In this consists His co-existence with the creature.”
The Shepherd’s rod and staff signal his leadership and a shared life of love and companionship; the Shepherd’s table and cup anticipate his protection and sacrificial life of grace. For not only do we need guidance in life to protect us from daily peril, but we also need grace to free us from past sins, to deliver us from the tangle of bad decisions and faithless acts.
To both sheep and fugitive, the Shepherd provides life and the conditions for living it. A personal God is protection and guidance on the one hand, and grace and refuge on the other.
Jesus fills out in marvelous detail Psalm 23 in its entirety. Our Shepherd continues to work specifically and historically in the lives of men and women, guiding them, saving them—guiding us, saving us.
The prayer is filled with shadows, but the Shepherd is never absent: guidance and grace. Guidance for a wandering sheep and grace for a guilty fugitive. Guidance and grace triumph. The last words summarize what over a lifetime we can expect to experience: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
But none of the ransomed ever knew How deep were the waters crossed; Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through Ere He found His sheep that was lost.
