Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Monday, October 6, 2008

Top Ten

World Communion Sunday

I am the Lord your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery...

We’ve all heard perhaps more than we would have liked of recent debates concerning monuments to the Ten Commandments on public property, debates that seem to me most often to generate more heat than light. Are the commandments simply common sense regulations, universally applicable across religions and cultures, which all people everywhere would do well to obey? The introductory statement suggests not. These were commands issued to a very particular group of people in a very particular time, which they then carried forward into their particular faith as a sort of standard of community behavior. What’s more, straightforward as they may seem, there is no consistent agreement even on something so seemingly simple as the proper numbering. Even Christian groups argue about whether verses 3 and 4 comprise a single command or two. The final command in Exodus places coveting a neighbor’s house ahead of coveting his spouse, while the list in Deuteronomy has it the other way around.

In the 1980s I served the Presbyterian church in Port Arthur, Texas — a town recently in the news along with Galveston because of the devastation of Hurricane Ike. During my tenure as pastor of that congregation we constructed a new sanctuary. The name of the church had recently been changed to The Presbyterian Church of the Covenant because of its history. In 1979 two formerly separated Presbyterian churches in the city were united into one— they covenanted together to become one church family. Because the name of the church included the word “covenant,” at the rear of the new sanctuary we commissioned stained-glass windows depicting the 6 biblical covenants.1 Upon exiting the sanctuary, you could see on the far left the Noah “rainbow covenant” window, then the Abraham window, and, next to the door, the 10 commandments window, known formerly and very affectionately, as the nine commandments window. You might wonder why nine commandments? The artist who designed the window — and it was a modern window for a modern sanctuary — said the Roman numeral “X” representing the 10th commandment was supposed to be there in your imagination, obscured behind a rough bunch of color that was supposed to represent the Sinai mountain. It didn’t matter, though, what it was supposed to represent. Most people who saw it said immediately, “Hey, how come only nine commandments?”

Before that window was altered by the stained glass company to include the Roman numeral for ten, lots of jokes were passed around local ministerial circles in the community to the effect that the Presbyterians were obedient to all commandments except one, and no one could agree on which one it was that we were free to ignore. My favorite explanation for the missing commandment came from the person who said it was missing because the 10th commandment was implied in the name of our church: the Presbyterian Church of the “Covet-not.”

Lots of writers through the ages have had a lot to say about the commandments, however we number them

H.L. Mencken, never a particularly religious man, once wrote, “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

Once, at a National Press Association meeting, Ted Turner declared, in his usual, shy, understated way, “... We’re living with outmoded rules ... and I bet nobody here even pays too much attention to ‘em because they are too old. When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, there was no poverty. Today the Ten Commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded. Commandments are out.”

Mark Twain once told of a conversation with a notoriously ruthless businessman, who said to him in passing, “Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top.” Mark Twain replied, “I have a better idea; you could stay home and keep them.”

While it’s true that we may sometimes possess an uncritical desire to be free of laws and limitations, some sort of law is absolutely essential to the creation of any sort of community. Some things you have to be able to count on. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter could be expected to speak for the importance of the letter of the law, and he once wrote, “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.” On the other hand, speaking on behalf of the importance of the law’s spirit, former Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote “It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.”

Of course, biblical law is not to be confused with civil law. A God-created covenantal community was and is something new. The new thing which came into being at Sinai was a covenanting community based on trust and forgiveness because that was the way God had determined to deal with the community. Freed Egyptian slaves were to acknowledge God by granting each other freedom under the law.

The old oversimplification that the Old Testament represents oppressive legalism while the New Testament supersedes law just isn’t accurate. It is inaccurate because Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”2

What this means as we approach the Ten Commandments in search for understanding is that the law is God’s gift to liberate the human community not to enslave it. To realize the necessity of law, we only need to turn the idea around and consider the chilling alternative: a community of people in which fathers and mothers need not be obeyed, killing is condoned, adultery is permitted, thievery is not prohibited, lying is not unlawful. What sort of covenanting community of mutual trust would be possible under those circumstances?

The law provides boundaries for God’s people, while forming the very heart of Israel’s freedom. Oddly enough, it was failure to obey the very first commandment that most often seemed to be Israel’s undoing, that frequently led to failure in obeying the other commandments, that led to the re-enslavement of the people. “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the primary assertion in the law from which all the rest is derived, and the reason why placement of the 10 Commandments on public property rubs against the anti-establishment clause of the constitution in many people’s minds.

The 10 Commandments represent not only social faithfulness, as found in the last 6 commandments, but our very faithfulness to God. It is all of one piece. One cannot be faithful to God and faithless to neighbor. One cannot make an idol of bricks and sticks, or ministers, or church school curriculum, or a favorite set of hymns, or an accustomed seat in a pew, or flag, or country, or job, or even family, or school, or church, and expect to be declared an obedient servant, a free child of God.

True freedom under the law rests in obedience to the law in spirit as well as in letter. Jesus wanted to make this clear not just through his teaching, but in the offering of his life. In John’s gospel Jesus spoke of a new temple.3 As the disciples reflected later he was referring to the temple of his very self in resurrected form. Those who try to live their lives by the 10 commandments, who know that Christ is our new sanctuary, also know what the church building is and is not. And they also know that the freedom of salvation in any age is not earned by obedience to the law, but by the saving, loving acts of God.

We gather today around the table in community with each other. The word for our celebration is based in community with its name “communion.” The very community we share is possible because of the loving provision of God’s law, and the perfect expression of it in Jesus Christ. So, of course, we gather not only in community with each other here, but in community with our brothers and sisters gathered at the table down the block, across town, throughout the nation, and all across the world. The worldwide community of the faithful is possible because of the faithfulness of one man, Jesus Christ, whose perfection and self-sacrifice have saved us, and made justification through grace under the law possible for us all.

_________________________________
1 The Covenant with Noah, Genesis 6-9; the Covenant with Abraham, Genesis 12-17; the Covenant with Moses and Israel, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5; the Covenant with Jeremiah, Jeremiah 31:31; Jesus’ covenant “sealed in my blood,” Luke 22:20, I Corinthians 11:25.
2 Matthew 5:17.
3 John 2:13-22.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Low Carb Faith

Some believe in eating anything,
while the weak eat only vegetables.

I guess they had different things to argue about in churches in Paul’s day than ours, like what was on the after-church supper menu. The weak eat only vegetables...? Come again? How is it that vegetarianism was singled out as a sign of weakness? Was Paul an Atkins diet guy, a three-meal-a-day meat eater, a man of low-carb faith? This is one of those times when it’s important to know the story behind the story.

Paul’s words refer to folks in the first century church who would eat only vegetables because they had religious scruples involved with the consumption of meat, most likely meat that was first offered to idols in pagan temples, then sold in the open markets afterward, a common practice by which temple priests raised money. The problem with consumption of meat from the markets was that you could never be sure that the meat you had purchased hadn’t first been offered up as a sacrifice to a pagan god. So some folks decided to forego meat altogether. We know that Paul wasn’t one of them, in fact he seemed to see it as a sign of weak faith: since he didn’t believe pagan gods existed, he had no problem eating meat, regardless of the source.

The issue seems distant from us now, doesn’t it? As with many church controversies over time, this one eventually faded into virtual irrelevance.

Church people across the centuries are famous for our ability to major in minors. If it was decided that meat-eating was inferior to vegetable eating, what would come next? Vegetable comparison, that’s what: broccoli’s superiority to celery, maybe, or green beans over summer squash.

A low carb carnivore himself, Paul nevertheless saw the need to change the subject.

I love the way our passage begins, the first word of Paul’s instruction to them is one of my favorite New Testament words: “Welcome.” Now, we all want to think of ours as a welcoming church, though it strikes some people, I know it does, as a side issue, not the main thing. But it is not a side issue in the New Testament. Just check the forms of the word “welcome” in any Bible concordance and see how busy it keeps you looking up all the references. My concordance lists 59 places in The New Testament where it is used. It is used more frequently than the word “praise” in the New Testament, more than “compassion,” more than “healing,” and more than “comfort.”

This is good news, really. It’s likely that few of us think of ourselves as healers, probably not many claim to be world-class praisers or are recognized for the vast comfort and compassion we hand out to others. But what does it take to be a welcomer? Well, not all that much, just about anyone can do it, all it requires is an extended hand, a heart that is opened just a crack wider, and perhaps saying the word out loud to others every now and then: “Welcome.” Not a difficult task, yet it receives very high praise as an act of pure gospel in the New Testament.

Undervalued, that’s what I think it is. So, Paul says, “Welcome...” But welcome whom? If we are supposed to throw the door open, run out the red carpet, get the guest room ready, whom is it for? Well, that’s the difficult part in the church, isn’t it? Church is like family, you don’t get to choose your family, your family chooses you, at least sort-of. First our family chooses us, then they are stuck with us. In the church, we are the collection of people who have decided to throw our lot in together in this place to be a church. Maybe we have an idea of the way our fellow church members ought to look, how they ought to act, what sort of clothes they should wear, the kind of manners they should have when they are here, whether or not they should have bacon and eggs or granola for breakfast, and maybe sometimes we look around ourselves here in this sanctuary and mutter under our breath, “Well, whatever I had in mind for the way a church family should look, this sure isn’t it!”

Paul reminds us with that opening word that welcome comes before everything else. We don’t get to choose the way our church family looks because welcome is the first word, not some qualifying test. You are welcome here. Sit wherever you like, there are no reserved seats. Whoever you are, whatever baggage — literal or figurative — you carry in here, you are welcome. Maybe you favor a different hairstyle, maybe you like to say your prayers in Portuguese, or Gaelic, maybe you wear the same tie every Sunday, maybe you don’t own a tie, maybe your blouse could stand ironing, maybe you have just a tad too much starch in your blouse, maybe you find gospel hymns objectionable, maybe gospel hymns are your favorites, maybe you prefer a church filled with stained glass windows, maybe you prefer a church with no windows, maybe you think the organ music is too loud, maybe you think the organ music can’t be loud enough, maybe you wish the ministers would do away with their black robes, maybe its the robes that make you feel you are in church, maybe you think a hundred other things and others think a hundred things that are just the opposite.

No matter, the first word to us, as it was to those Romans in this 14th chapter, is “welcome.” If we were to wonder about our main task in the church, we wouldn’t have to go a lot further than that one word.

Now, what was Paul adding to that word? Well, just the sort of thing I have been describing. The Roman church was filled with Presbyterians, people who were entirely willing to disagree about anything and everything. Some in the church had been Jews, some had been pagans, some may have been a mixture of the two. Some members might have had scruples about eating meat because most of the meat you could buy had first been offered at one of the hundreds of pagan shrines. So some would just rather not eat meat than chance to eat something which had been made an offering to a god they didn’t believe existed.

Of course, being Presbyterians, others disagreed, saying that meat offered to gods they didn’t believe existed anyway would do no harm, so they ate meat. Paul called the vegetarians the ones who were “weak in faith.” Sounds pretty critical on first glance, but there is another way to look at it. Paul wrote to the Corinthians also and he used this word “weak” this way: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world...”1

Hmmm, it sounds as though weakness comes with higher recommendations than we might first have thought. There’s more: Paul also wrote, “For [Christ] was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.”2 Paul also wrote, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”3

So when he counsels us to welcome those who are weak in faith, it could just be that their weak faith has eclipsed what we thought was the strongest part of our own. The lesson in that is that we are not worth much to the kingdom on our own, we are meant to be a sociable church, an hospitable community of saints, a gathering of the faithful, not a collection of lone rangers who pay each other little heed, and reserve contempt for those we judge to be weaker or lesser in some way.

Here is the rub: Paul said, “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” Wow, how lucky for them, the Lord will come along and make them stand, unlike those of us who are able to stand on our own strength...er...no, that wouldn’t be it, would it? No, standing on our own strength is definitely not the main subject of the gospel, not even encouraged in its dark little side chapels. No, before God all are the weak ones, is that not true?

Anyone who thinks they are strong enough to stand before God will one day learn their error. How wonderful that Paul encouraged the building of a fellowship that recognized this from the outset, and set about creating the church as an hospitable place where the welcome did not wait until we became strong, the seat in the pews is not reserved for those who already know their Bible, the singing of the songs is not the personal and private domain of those who know the songs of faith already. If you are today in a church for the very first time ever, you cannot be any less welcome than the person who has occupied a pew in church every single Sunday for the past fifty years.

Paul said, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” Exactly. If we did, who would need a church? Who would need welcome, who would need to gather? Faith would be a matter of thinking good thoughts, or obeying certain rules, but it would be something we would accomplish on our own. No, Paul says we do not live to ourselves, and it is a lesson that no people on earth have a harder time learning than Americans, who like to think of ourselves as up-by-our-bootstraps people, self-made, rugged individualists. In the face of this sort of thinking, Paul simply holds up a mirror of ourselves in our death masks. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

The only hope for us is that we live and we die to the Lord. We throw ourselves on the mercy of God in our living and in our dying, and we join in humility with others in the fellowship, whether their hair is parted the way we like it or not, like a beleaguered ship full of sailors for whom the only hope is the Lord who calms the sea for them and leads them safely home.

Why is welcome such an important word? Why do we do this thing, why do we say hello to each other and offer blessings as our first act of worship, why are we called so forcefully to be a fellowship of welcome and hospitality? It is because we have been welcomed. Carrying a load of trouble? We are welcome in this place where we may set our troubles down. Burdened by a backlog of bad things in our lives which we regret? We are welcome here, regrets and all. This is our home because we have nothing to prove here, only our humble prayer for the love of God and our extension of that love to each other is needed here. That is why we do what we do, for the love of God.

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1 I Corinthians 1:26-29
2 II Corinthians 13:4
3 II Corinthians 11:30

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Do No Harm

Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones.

I recently read that back in some of the bad old days of professional baseball’s Minnesota Twins — one of those forgettable seasons when they were losing lots of games — the team was in the middle of long losing streak on the road, and the manager, Tom Kelly, announced, “Before the game tomorrow there will be two buses leaving the hotel for the field. The 2:00 bus will be for those of you who need a little extra practice. The empty bus will be leaving at 5:00.”

Last week we looked with Pastor Linda at the verses prior to this week’s lesson, in which Jesus called a child and placed the child in the midst of the disciples, reminding them that greatness in the kingdom of God is measured by our care for the weak and powerless ones in our midst. Remembering this takes a lot of practice, looking to the almost invisibly weak ones in our midst is not something that comes without effort.

So today, we move into Jesus’ teaching, knowing that the words “little ones” refer to more than children. The symbol of the helpless child in our midst is meant to open our eyes to the presence of any “little people” in our company, the ones the world tends to overlook in its haste to be impressed by those who find themselves impressive. Jesus presents some of his most vivid teaching in regard to this commitment to the least, last, and lost among us.

Have you ever felt out of place in some situation? Invited to the company party as a new employee, you found yourself standing off to one side, nursing a drink, no one talking to you, too afraid of rejection to initiate a conversation. Does that sound familiar? Coming to a strange church for the first time, you venture to the coffee fellowship time only to discover that it appears everyone but you knows someone there and you feel like a fifth wheel, so you slip quietly out a side door?

It’s not just coffee-chatter social situations that give us that out-of-place feeling. On any given Sunday in this sanctuary I would dare say there are people present who feel out of place and who have been fighting against a strong impulse to stay home or leave. It is so easy to think everyone else has it all together in their lives when we see each other all scrubbed clean, wearing our good clothes, sporting happy-looking smiles. We forget there are people among us who are facing the possibility of unemployment, whose marriages are hanging by a thread, whose children have just presented them with the worst news of their lives, who have a loved one facing death, who can’t remember how to pray. We forget the church is not about greatness but about humble service to the least, last, and lost among us, which at one time or another will likely be any one of us.

Our worship should always carry that element. Our culture encourages the alternative idea that the purpose of worship has to do with what I get out of it. I hear that phrase a lot, a lot more than I like anyway. “I didn’t get anything out of the sermon,” or “I didn’t get anything out of the hymns we sang this morning,” or “I didn’t get anything out the prayers today.” Here’s a news flash I have mentioned before, we weren’t praying to you. Where do we get this idea that the worship of the church of God is about what we “get out of it” as individuals? You won’t find that phrase, “what I get out of it,” much less the sentiment it expresses, anywhere in scripture. Yet to hear some folks talk, you’d think it had replaced John 3:16 as the most well-known verse of the Bible.

What we put into it, now that is a whole other matter. That would be a fun exercise to try. “You know pastor, as I listened to your sermon, what I put into it was this thought...” or “as I sang that hymn, what I put into it was the biggest sound I could make,” or “during the prayer, what I put into it was a special prayer for my aunt Edna...” Never mind what we are getting out of worship today, what are we putting into it? Worship in some consumer-oriented churches, churches that have been advised by focus groups and success-driven church management people about what people want, are all about “what I get out of it.” But the worship of the Church of God is different than the worship of the church of Rob. The worship of this church is for the whole people gathered here. The individual’s thing is not the only thing, or even the main thing. That sounds almost like heresy in an era of personal computers and single serving frozen dinners, but the fact is that worship is not essentially about entertaining and instructing individuals. It is not mostly about getting what I want or think I need. The hard news is that it is not just for me. It’s not about what I believe, it’s about what we, the community of Christ, believe together.

If that is true, then we will see the utter, complete necessity of turning toward the least, last, and lost among us. It is such an absolutely necessary attitude in the fellowship of the church that Jesus resorted to the strongest sort of hyperbole in order to make his point. “Does your hand cause you to stumble? Cut it off! How about your eye? Pluck it out!” This language travels down the difficult road of hyperbole and metaphor, with severed body parts littering the imaginary landscape. Some of you may know that when students are going through trials for ordination to become pastors in our denomination, there comes a time when they must stand before the gathered Presbytery and answer any question the presbyters — elders and pastors — see fit to ask. It can be a terrifying occasion. One age old question, sometimes asked, comes right from our reading. One bright day a young candidate for ministry was asked it, “Would you be willing to suffer great personal injury for the glory of God?” After having suffered other pompous, self-satisfied questions of a few members of Presbytery assembled there, he replied smartly, “Sir, I would be willing for this whole Presbytery to suffer some great injury if it would glorify God!”

When Jesus says it would be better for some terrible thing to happen — that an arm or an eye should be lost — than to miss the opportunity to follow Jesus, the emphasis is meant to be on the incomparable joy of being in the community of Christ and not on the amputation. To know Jesus is wonderful, so wonderful that if a person knew how wonderful, he or she would sacrifice extravagantly in order to know him. When one of our friends says, “I wouldn’t miss my son’s graduation for anything,” we don’t usually follow up their claim saying, “Really, would you give up your house? Your family? Your career?” We know they are speaking hyperbolically. The point is not that our friend will arrive at the graduation ceremony destitute and in rags, without eyes or hands. The point is that they think it would simply be one of life’s not-to-be-missed moments. In the same way, there is nothing on earth of more value than being part of the kingdom, and opening that doorway for others. It is something not to be missed, worth whatever we may have to sacrifice to obtain it.

The thing to know in regard to the weak ones in our midst is that there is nothing in the kingdom scale of items of importance that stands ahead of taking care of the ones who are little in faith, little in ability, little in knowledge, little in experience. Nothing the church fellowship can think to do is more important than welcome and encouragement for those who have little or nothing to offer in return, nothing surpasses the importance of opening the door, of making way for those whom the world scorns as of little or no significance. Jesus really couldn’t be more clear about this. But he went on to try. He shared the wonderful little parable of the lost sheep that was part of our reading. He introduced the parable by declaring, “I tell you that [the angels of these little ones] always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” Whatever he may have meant by that comment about angels, it at least seems clear “that it is precisely the little, and not the big, who have an abiding relationship with God.”1

When Clarence Jordan produced his Southern vernacular Cotton Patch translation of Matthew almost 40 years ago now, he rendered Jesus’ little parable this way:

[Jesus said] “How do you see it? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them strays off, won’t he leave the ninety-nine in the pasture and go look after the stray? And when he finds it, I’m sure that he’s more proud of it than of the ninety-nine that didn’t stray. That’s exactly the way it is with your spiritual Father. He doesn’t want a single one of those little people to be abandoned.”2

Every now and then we need to re-ask ourselves Jesus’ question from the Shepherding 101 class exam: “If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” Would a good, fiscally responsible shepherd leave 99 healthy but vulnerable sheep to manage on their own for a while as he went looking for one that was lost? We have to answer no, don’t we? Who would be crazy enough to hire a shepherd that answered yes?

This serves to remind us that kingdom economics concerning people are not like the economics of the world, the economics we are accustomed to. The very least Jesus expects of us is that we not provide stumbling blocks that drive the odd sheep into the wilderness. It is the odd sheep, the one who seems not to fit, the person who seems most like a nobody in a room full of presumptive somebodies, that person is the very favorite in God’s eyes. And woe to those who do not do all they can to see these things the way God sees them.

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1 The Parables of Grace, by Robert Farrar Capon, Eerdmans, (Grand Rapids: 1988), p. 36.
2 The Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John, by Clarence Jordan, Follett Publishing Co., (Chicago: 1970), p. 61.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

On Breathing and Praising

On Breathing and Praising
Fourth in a Series of Sermons on the Psalms

We once counted the words up in a Bible study I led, and found that the word “praise” is used 12 to 13 times in Psalm 150, depending on the translation we read. Apart from the beginning and ending exclamations of praise, there are ten phrases that begin with the word “praise.” Possibly there are that number of sentences beginning with that word to serve as a sort of memory device. A youngster could learn about praising God by counting off the ten praises on ten fingers. We could try it:

Where should we praise the Lord?
[1] Praise God in his sanctuary;
[2] praise him in his mighty firmament!
Why should we praise God?
[3] Praise him for his mighty deeds;
[4] praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
How should we praise God?
[5] Praise him with trumpet sound;
[6] praise him with lute and harp!
[7] Praise him with tambourine and dance;
[8] praise him with strings and pipe!
[9] Praise him with clanging cymbals;
[10] praise him with loud clashing cymbals!

Then, of course, there is the little addendum letting us know who is invited to the praise party: “everything that breathes,” which, at last count, was just about everyone, “praise the Lord.” And did you notice that the “where” question was answered with two phrases, the “why” question with two phrases? The “how” question, though, was answered with six phrases referring to eight different musical instruments and the earliest-known version of the Jitterbug. Throughout the Old Testament, dance is associated with joy and celebration, and probably played a big part in worship in the Jerusalem Temple. The psalmist was pretty excited about music as a means of praise, and the description of musical instruments for worship here is extravagant.

Some folks once declared — and some still believe — that we ought not have keyboard instruments in church, since they aren’t mentioned in the Bible. What a humorless reading of the intention of this psalm that is! The psalm doesn’t refer to pianos and pipe organs — along with saxophones, English horns, bells, piccolos, zithers, harmonicas and electric bass guitars — only because they hadn’t been invented yet. The list of instruments in the psalm is certainly not meant to be exhaustive but suggestive. We are meant to see that real praise involves a lot of music on the widest possible array of music-makers. Picturing this psalm being sung in the Jerusalem Temple, I have in mind an enthusiastic celebration, plenty of volume, and lots of shouting, singing and dancing.

In my English translation, I count only 71 words altogether in the whole psalm. There are even fewer in Hebrew, only 34 words, since in Hebrew you can say a lot with a single word. And you already know the Hebrew word for praise, did you realize that? That’s right, it is the word “hallelu,” as in “hallelujah!” The other part of hallelujah in Hebrew simply means, “the Lord.” So if you knew the word “hallelujah,” you already knew a complete Hebrew sentence, maybe without even realizing it. Out of 34 Hebrew words which make up this psalm, 13 have the word “hallelu” or “praise” built into them. 12 of the sentences actually begin with that word. It seems clear to me that if we have any intention of getting the most out of Psalm 150, we’re going to have to know about praising!

Perhaps, like most one-syllable words, we think we know what “praise” is when we hear it, but do we really? Did you know that the original meaning of the English word “praise” is “to set a price on”? That’s right, it is a form of the word “appraise,” as in “appraisal,” which anyone who owns a house in this state already knows plenty about. So, for a long time, the word “praise” required other modifiers to make its meaning clear in context. If it meant “price,” then words had to be attached to let us know if our “appraisal” should be high or low. So we hear about “high praise,” “faint praise,” and so on. Knowing the root of our English word, at least we know our word for “hallelu” has to do with value. But the Hebrew word is much richer.

Terms associated with “hallelu” in the Hebrew Bible are such words as “glorify,” “magnify,” “extol,” “bless,” and “rejoice.”

Every believer has to answer the reporters’ questions in regard to our own praises of God. But before we get to asking about where or how, probably we need to have some sense of why. Why praise? Why God? Why me? Psalm 150 dismisses the question with two short phrases: praise God because of his deeds and because of who God is. That may seem less than satisfying, but remember, Psalm 150 follows 149 other psalms with lots of other reasons given for praising God: because, according to previous psalms, by God’s word heavens and earth were created,1 by God’s action, Israel was freed from Egypt,2 because God’s nature is to seek justice for the oppressed and give food to the hungry,3 God turns grieving to dancing and clothes people with joy,4 he grants forgiveness,5 he made known his law to Moses to help guide our lives.6

Why praise God? “Tell me why you love me,” we ask of those who claim to love us. And when they start their list, if it is really love, the explanation soon sounds ridiculous. Explain why there is air, why honey tastes sweet, why the laugh of a baby is so pleasant, why a burst of sunshine after a rainy cool winter day is so refreshing. Eventually all our whys move toward praise because simple thank-yous for specific things just don’t seem to be enough. Words don’t seem enough either, so when we feel praise coming on — whether at a football game or because of a loving kiss — we feel moved toward music and our feet want to dance. When it comes to praise, the arts — music, poetry, and dance — have it all over logic and rhetoric. So where the psalter begins with a celebration of the law in Psalm 1, it ends in Psalm 150 with an adoring celebration of the One who gave the law.

The very first Psalm. Do you remember how it goes? “Blessed are those...whose delight is in the law of the Lord.” The law is about obedience, and before we can do very much about loving God, we first have to know what it means to be obedient — even if the main thing we learn from that is how very disobedient we’ve been. That is what the law is for. But obedience is not the end toward which God is moving us, not ultimately. God is not like the wife of Rumpole of the Bailey, not some fanatical tin pot dictator who requires nothing so much as that she be obeyed. The psalms have moved from the opening in obedience to this closing in praise, because God seeks to move people toward adoration, toward celebration, toward the happy realization that we have a great God who loves us beyond our capacity to absorb it or understand it.

When a young man says he worships the ground his girl walks on, it is pretty obvious that his feelings toward that girl are strong, captivating, that he is overcome by her. Contrast that with our own experiences sometimes when we say we have been in worship. Same word, very different meaning. Rather than strong feelings, we may have failed to feel anything at all; far from being captivated by our love of God, we may only be aware of having been distracted; instead of being overcome, we may have been casual and half-hearted in our worship. Someone once said that, on the whole, the topic of God’s love for us is a great deal safer than the topic of our love for God.

Yet even in our callous, half-hearted distraction, God never fails to love us. Every now and then, the truth of that comes home to us in all its stunning reality, and we sit down and write hymns with titles like “Amazing Grace,” “On Our Way Rejoicing,” “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” We find ourselves in that one certain worship service where worship was, finally, the right word. Every now and then, our praise of God truly sets us free, we really feel it, and we know what it is to sing and to dance and to give heartfelt thanks to God.

A psalm of praise, like Psalm 150, doesn’t express the only mood appropriate to the Christian life. After all, there are many other psalms, psalms of lament, psalms of hope, psalms of supplication and intercession. Yet when all is said and done, the One to whom we have addressed all our laments, hopes, supplications and intercessions is worthy of our praise.

Today is a good day to praise the Lord. And I hope that all our worship together can be characterized by praise. The psalm says that everything that breathes should be caught up in the praise of God. It’s the least we can offer to a Lord as great as ours.

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1 Psalm 33:6-7.
2 Psalm 66:6.
3 Psalm 146:7.
4 Psalm 30:11.
5 Psalm 32:5.
6 Psalm 103:7.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Knowing and Being Known

Knowing and Being Known
Third in a Series of Sermons on the Psalms

We are known. There is no doubt that the poet who wrote the words of Psalm 139 believed that he was known. Philosophers may use words such as “omniscience” when speaking of the knowledge of God. And while there can be no question that the psalmist would readily have agreed that God is omniscient in that he knows his creation as a painter knows his canvas, his poem comes at the question from a different perspective. The psalmist realizes not only that God knows but that he knows about him. And even that does not put it clearly enough, since it is evident that the psalmist is possessed of a sense that he is known more than that he is known about. He is known “through and through,” from beginning to end. God not only knows about him. God knows what it is like to be him.

In the face of this knowledge that reaches even into the depths of the womb, we may feel exposed, as though we were part of a divine “peep show.” We want to draw the blinds. Who is prepared for such intimacy? What business is it of God what went on between my mother and me in the womb? Is God also the Divine Voyeur?

It is just this reluctance to be known that is revealed in the Genesis account of the walk in the garden. We want to know, to have knowledge such as God has. If there are any peep shows going on, we want to do the peeping. We want to be God. We want to be able to reveal only so much of ourselves to this Other as we desire, and we want to have the power and privilege of choosing just who it is to whom we make these partial self-revelations.

This is the declaration of the psalm that we may find disturbing if we really give it some thought. No room is left there for us to have any choice in the matter. We are known, known at every level of our being, probably known even at levels of which we are not aware. And we are known by this Other whether or not we choose to be known. The roles we would have chosen - if we could have chosen - are reversed. We might choose to know others, or even to know God, the Other, but to limit the knowledge they have about us, because knowledge represents power. To know someone is to have a measure of power over them. When we know another person or a bit of fresh gossip about them, we can make predictions, forecast their behavior, and we can use that knowledge to suit our purposes.

We are understandably reluctant to hand over such power to someone else. But the psalmist is aware that he is known, was known, and will be known by this Other so completely that he has given up trying to understand it:

“God, how hard it is to grasp your thoughts!
How impossible to count them!”1

The roles we would choose are reversed. We are known, like it or not. The very idea can be threatening. To what use might the power of such knowledge be put? Is the purpose behind such knowing malevolent or benevolent, evil or kind?

“My Father,” Jesus said, “if this cup cannot pass by without my drinking it, your will be done!”2

Christian believers answer the question of the intention behind God’s intimate knowledge by pointing to Jesus. It is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the attitude that Jesus expressed toward God in the midst of it all that convinces Christians that God’s intentions toward us are benevolent, are filled with loving purpose for the world he has created.

We are not only known, we are loved. God has demonstrated, through Jesus, that God’s love for us is as direct, complete, even embarrassing, as God’s knowledge of us. God comes close to us, it might even occur to us that God comes too close for comfort. Again, we may be struck by an impulse to protect ourselves from the ultraviolet rays of such penetrating love. We want to choose our loves. We don’t necessarily want to be chosen. But if we are known so intimately, loved so completely and with such familiarity that we can call the maker of all that exists our “Father,” our “Abba,” our “Daddy,” then we must also be claimed by God, no matter what we do. Paul wrote,

“Nothing can come between us and the love of Christ... For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.”3

As we gather in the church or a nondescript chapel in the funeral home, trying nervously not to think too hard about what has happened to old uncle Stan, the preacher stands behind the pulpit and declares to us that there is nothing that can come between God and Stan, especially not now: no disease, no eight months in a coma, no cerebral hemorrhage, no coffin, no grave, nothing at all. God claims us. God’s knowledge of us goes beyond a detached interest, God’s love for us goes beyond a momentary infatuation, God’s intimacy with us lays claim to us. “I know my own and my own know me...”4 It is not the knowing that matters as much as knowing we are God’s own. It is not a knowing that is the result of some objective, scientific scrutiny, but a knowing that issues from personal contact and interest and desire for relationship.

God lays claim to us. God’s knowledge, love, and call to be God’s chosen ones all lay claim to us. But like a kind lover, God does not force the advantage. There is always an escape clause, the possibility of refusal. God’s love is such that inasmuch as it is freely given, God desires that it be freely returned.

We live in a time in which our own culture places obstacles in our way as God seeks to establish an intimate relationship with us. Once, a football coach was being honored at halftime. One of his former players, now a portly businessman, read over the loudspeaker the words that were engraved on the plaque:

“He never did anything that he would have to apologize to God for.”

There was thunderous applause (In spite of the fact that the statement on the plaque ended a sentence with a preposition). The coach humbly received his award and returned to his seat. Such is the view of God in our culture of non-intimacy. God is the keeper of the score card. God’s interest in us is seemingly limited to the role of police officer, enforcer.

Our culture of non-intimacy simply does not foster a sense of being known through and through by a loving, benevolent God. Its sense of God is more likely to be one which - if it views God at all - views him as adversary, as the keeper of the heavenly gate, stickler for the heavenly rules, frowning down upon us from his distant, high heaven. How far removed this is from the God who watched the psalmist’s bones being knitted in the womb!

Small wonder that when I have sometimes read Psalm 139 at funerals, I am often asked if it really comes from the Bible. It is so foreign to what so many think and feel about God from day to day.

The first cultural obstacle to modern day relationship with the God of intimacy is a popular view of God as One who knows but who does not necessarily love.

A second obstacle is even more ingrained. Our age has long since embarked upon a course of seeking the good through the assertion of individualism. When we are not healthy or in good mental balance, we are encouraged to “find ourselves,” to dig into the resources that are within us, to live up to our own individual potentials, to fulfill ourselves. When we are in conflict with others, we are encouraged to let others “own” their own problems; seldom are we encouraged to bear each other’s burdens. When friendships are not fulfilling, there is little encouragement to remain friends with another person for the sake of the relationship itself. We are told, in many ways, that the answers to all our troubles lie within ourselves, and that we are not responsible for the troubles of others. I recently saw a rewording of the old aphorism, “to err is human, to forgive, divine.” The new translation goes, “to err is dysfunctional, to forgive, co-dependent.”

“The trouble with the consciousness movement is not that it addresses trivial or unreal issues but that it provides self-defeating solutions. Arising out of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations, it advises people not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependency on others, and to live for the moment - the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place.”5

The recognition of God’s intimate and loving knowledge of us from birth, through and beyond death, calls the myth of self-reliance into question. If we affirm, with the psalmist, that God’s deep knowledge of us is accompanied by his loving care and concern, then cause for relationship with God is established.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” In the end, the psalm concludes where every true disciple must: that a God who so demonstrably knows and loves us is worthy to see even the wickedness within us, so that it may be purged away. The psalmist throws himself on the mercy of the court, for that mercy has been tried and found sufficient.

Sufficient then, sufficient now. Sufficient for you and sufficient for me. Praise God.

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1 Psalm 139:17, Jerusalem Version
2 Matthew 26:42
3 Romans 8:35-39
4 John 10:14
5 Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Norton, 1979.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Mountain Maker

I look up to the mountains;
does my strength come from mountains?
No, my strength comes from God,
who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.1

This is Eugene Peterson’s interesting and informative version of the first two verses of our passage in his translation of the Bible called The Message.

Think of the number of “Where were you when” stories we have in our lives. The older we are, the more we are likely to have. “Where were you when you heard the news...” about Pearl Harbor — about Sputnik — about the assassination of JFK — about the moon landing — about the collapse of the Berlin Wall — about the airplanes ramming the World Trade Center buildings? But there is a special variety of these “where were you when...” questions that have to do with natural, rather than human-caused, events. Where were you when you heard the news about... the collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi in Minnesota or the collapse of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco?

After earthquakes and eruptions anywhere in the world, we can count on the news outlets to run another set of stories interviewing seismologists about the prospects for “the Big One,” along the San Andreas fault or in the Pacific Northwest. It’s enough to make you want to stay home... as long as you don’t live on or near a hillside or by the ocean. Or anywhere, really. Folks in the plains states are terrorized by prospects of tornados, along the Mississippi it’s flooding, and on the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, hurricanes are the chief threat, and don’t forget tsunamis on the Pacific.

Then we come across this psalm with its affirmation that the one who grants strength is the same one who made heaven and earth — and continental shelves and fault lines and rivers and mountains. Remember the scene from The Sound of Music, where the family is escaping the pursuing Nazis who want to press Baron Von Trap into service in the navy of the Third Reich. It seems they are trapped and have hit a dead end until Maria exclaims “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help!” and of course they make their escape by way of those famous hills, the Swiss Alps. And a million misunderstandings of an otherwise straightforward scripture passage were thus launched.

Any pastor I know can tell stories of families who have come to them with this familiar and beloved old misreading of Psalm 121 for use at funerals. People often quote the verse from memory in the King James Version, as Maria did in the movie: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” And the reason they love this psalm turns out to be a somewhat misguided reason, that their loved one really enjoyed the mountains or the outdoors, so this has become a sort of culturally accepted psalm in praise of the beauties of the mountains. Problem is, that is not at all what this psalm is about, a realization that comes immediately to us if we read the punctuation of that first verse that more modern scholars have provided, as well as the words themselves. It is clearly a question, not a sentimental statement: “I lift up my eyes to the hills — From where will my help come?”

Seeing the hills, the psalmist doesn’t suddenly recognize the source of his help, but by this view of them was given to wonder what the real source of help truly is.

On January 31, 1940, Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont received the first Social Security check ever issued, in the amount of $22.54.2 Ms. Fuller, a legal secretary, had worked for just three years under the Social Security program before retiring. She had paid in a total of $24.75 in Social Security taxes – an amount that was nearly exhausted by that first check she received. Ms. Fuller wasn’t sure at first whether it was worth applying for this new government benefit. While running an errand, she dropped by the Rutland, Vermont Social Security office to ask what, if anything, she was entitled to receive. Years later she said: “It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I’d been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it.” Stopping by the Social Security office that day turned out to be a very good move. Ms. Fuller started collecting benefits in January, 1940 at age 65. She lived to be 100 years old, and died in 1975. During her lifetime she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits — more than 1,000 times the amount she had paid into the system. Her story was common, among her generation of Social Security recipients. That’s the way the system had been designed. President Roosevelt and his advisers set up the system so that benefits of the first Social Security recipients would be paid for by the taxes contributed by their younger fellow-workers. When those workers retired, in turn, their benefits would be paid for by even younger workers, and so on it was to go. Many retirees, tearing open their monthly Social Security envelopes, continue to think the government is simply returning funds to them that have been held on deposit. In fact, if retirees live long enough, they too will reach the point Ida May Fuller reached just two months after her retirement — benefitting from the contributions of others. It was a way of everyone taking care of everyone and not just saying it was a matter of “every man for himself.”3

As the horde of baby-boomers — my generation — begins to stampede the Social Security system, we hear a lot about that system being in crisis. Mention it in conversation and you can almost feel the anxiety level begin to rise. I lift up mine eyes to the mountain of Social Security, from where does my help come...? Where can we turn for help? So many of the institutions of our lives, once considered inviolate, seem fragile, vulnerable. What is there to count on?

Just over 200 years ago, while crossing the Bitterroot Mountain Range in September of 1805, admittedly lost by his own account, facing the extra threats of early snow falling and a rapidly diminishing food supply as they struggled up trackless mountains strewn with fallen logs, their horses continually slipping and falling, William Clark wrote in his journal. “I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life. Indeed I was at one time fearful my feet would freeze in the thin Mockirsons (sic.) which I wore.” I wonder if, nearing the ends of their lives, either Lewis or Clark asked to have the 121st Psalm read to them or over them, in order to be reminded that the source of their help and strength came from mountains. I doubt it. On the contrary, I suspect they forever after saw mountains as barriers to be gotten over before their strength was fully used up.

It is interesting to me that after the 2nd verse of the psalm, the word “help” disappears, the driving question of where help comes from is replaced by who is the person of the helper, and the word help is replaced by the word keep. In fact, the concept of being kept by God is so important, that the term is used in one form or another 6 times in this short psalm. To be kept in the loving embrace of God is, in so many ways, so much more suggestive of the nature of God than looking only for help from God.

Because of that first verse, we may think of the psalm as a comment about where we may often turn to find help: in mountains/nature, in economic security, in our families. It turns out, though, that God is not so much our helper but our keeper, and that the important question is not where help is, but who is the helper who keeps us in view, keeps us from stumbling, keeps us in our going out and coming in from this time into forever.

The people of the Old Testament made pilgrimages up to Jerusalem for festival days like Passover, and I can tell you, they harbored no romantic notions about the hills or mountains being any kind of help to them at all in their lives or in their journeying. In fact, the most dangerous part of their pilgrimage was the trek through the dry mountainous terrain until Mount Zion with its Temple came into view. In the mountains, robbers lurked, unpredictable storms lashed them, wild animals waited for the cover of darkness to steal their provisions or their children. They made their way through the same hills about which Jesus spoke when he told the story of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and was set upon by robbers who came out of those dangerous hills, took his belongings, and beat him, leaving him for dead until that now-famous good Samaritan came along to provide unexpected help.

No, the psalm the pilgrims sang as they made their way up to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount was a song of fright and even of terror. “I lift up my eyes to the hills, the perilous, daunting, terrifying hills with their thousand dangers, and as I do I wonder where help might be if I needed it.” The answer to their question comes to them as they come in sight of the Temple: “My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth (and even the mountains themselves!).”

Have you ever found yourself in a place in your life where you wondered where your help was going to come from? The mute earth and sea that have swallowed millions of lives before you came along provide no answer, no response. And then you hear a sound. What is it? It is the sound of the arrival of those who have given their lives to God, who pursue their profession of helping the helpless out of a sense of calling from the God who keeps us, our going out and our coming in. It is the sound of ships and airplanes and helicopters and buses with Presbyterian missionary personnel, Red Cross professionals and volunteers, volunteer medical team personnel, and a thousand other organizations. I lift my eyes to the ocean that sent a tsunami and where is my help? My help comes not from the ocean, not from the land, not from the sky above or the earth beneath but from the Lord who provides, the Lord in whose name there are thousands setting aside and risking their own lives so that others may live.

A contemporary of mine shared a confessional prayer called “Confession of Who We Are,” apparently with the psalm in mind, which I want to share today in closing this sermon:

“Lord, we know help comes:
from care givers and counselors, treatments and prescriptions,
emergency squads and security officers,
nine-one-one, and self-help groups and social service safety nets,
planners and courts, diets and doctors,
congregations and families and friends.
Forgive when we forget, or never learn:
help comes in you, maker of heaven and earth; and of other helpers too;
and forgiveness comes in Jesus Christ our Lord.”4

Amen.

__________________________________
1 Eugene Peterson, The Message, © Eugene Peterson, NavPress Publishing Group, Colorado Springs.
2 Source: Social Security Administration, http://www.ssa.gov/history/imf.html
3 Thanks to Carlos Wilton in The Immediate Word, for February 20, 2005.
4 J. Barrie Shepherd, Praying the Psalms, Westminster Press, 1987.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Shepherd of the Sheep

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want...

This psalm is probably more well-known than any other passage from the Old Testament, and possibly at least as well-known and well-loved as any passage in either the Old or New Testaments. Familiarity is a great thing, but it can have its downside too. Phrases we know as well as we know our own names can take on a host of misunderstandings and misplacements which are hard to dislodge from our brains.

“The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want...” for instance. Read without the comma, the Lord becomes the one shepherd which a sheep doesn’t want.

I remember a wonderful woman in one of my Texas congregations, Judy Murphy, and the fact that when I listened to one of the 3rd grade youngsters reciting the 23rd Psalm, I heard him saying, “Surely good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life...”

There are dozens of these, made possible by solipsisms, missing punctuation, and plain old misunderstanding:

“He makes me lie ..... down in green pastures he restores my soul.”
“Shirley Goodness ... and Mercy [the Goodness sisters] shall follow me...”

On the other hand this psalm has inspired deep and lovely reflections on its meaning. Years ago, I ran across an affirmation about Psalm 23 whose author is unknown, at least to me. I thought it was so lovely that I have read this as an introduction to the psalm at dozens of funerals and memorial services since then:

“This psalm has flown like a bird up and down the earth singing the sweetest song ever heard. It has charmed more griefs to rest than all the philosophy of the world. It will go on singing to your children, and to their children, ’til the end of time. And when its work is done, it will fly back to the bosom of God, fold its wings, and sing on forever in the happy chorus of those it helped to bring there.”

A pastor I know, a college chaplain,1 bumped into one of his students who was to graduate in a week, and absent-mindedly he said, “Good luck.” He pondered that simple farewell and wondered why he’d said it, since, as he reflected later, “I didn’t believe a word of it.” It wasn’t because his student was so bright and blessed that he’d never need any help outside himself to make it in the world. It was just that the help that student, that any of us needs outside ourselves, has nothing to do with luck.

At the end of the book of Genesis, we find the concluding stories about Joseph son of Jacob, who had been his father’s favorite, and therefor his brothers’ least favorite, to the degree that they had determined one day to kill him but instead simply sold him off into slavery (and you think your family was dysfunctional!). Once he landed in Egypt, though, this bright youngster caught the eye of Pharaoh, who promoted him to chief of all things related to food in the kingdom. Meantime, his brothers had suffered a famine in their homeland and had come begging to Egypt, hoping for a handout. When they realized that the one they had come to ask for help was the very same brother they had treated so hatefully all those years ago, they were terrified at what he might do to them. But Joseph had grown far beyond thoughts of revenge, and told them not to be afraid: “You meant it for evil,” he said, “but God meant it for good.”

So there.

During the time that his brothers thought they were initiating evil, it so happens they weren’t the only characters doing things. God, it turns out, has the capacity to turn even evil works into good, and is at work behind what is behind the scenes. Ironically, their barbaric, murderous act turned out to be the very thing that saved the family from starvation.

“He leads me to water, he brings me to green pastures, he restores me...”

Any time I read the 23rd Psalm, so many images come to my mind, but one which comes back to me again and again is this one...

In his beautiful book, This House of Sky,2 Ivan Doig wrote about his experiences growing up as the only child of a widowed Montana sheep ranch foreman. In one portion of his story he recalled a time when an unseasonably cold July rainstorm threatened to wipe out his father’s entire flock of newly shorn sheep out on the summer range. In frantic desperation, Ivan, his father, the sheep dogs, even Ivan’s grandmother, alternately beat, cajoled, frightened, forced, and intimidated the sheep into the relative safety of a coulee by the river. Here is how he described it:

“As soon as the crew finished shearing the sheep the first few days of July ... the weather had an unaccountable chill ... and with our shorn ewes we had on our hands a double thousand of the world’s most undressed creatures ... these first days they stood naked, helpless to a storm ...

... The nightmare prospect was that the band could panic in the corral and crush onto one another in suicidal piles. For certain, in a cold, driving rain hundreds of trapped ewes would destroy themselves and their lambs that way. But the second worst threat was for a storm to maul into sheep loose for stampede on this unsheltered range...

... The first blast of wind swayed the trailer. We piled out the doorway into the longest day of our lives.

... Before we could reach the corral, a sharp rain began to sting down ... a wind steadily sharpening the storm’s attack ... The gate bowed, snapped apart against the tonnage of the hundreds of struggling bodies.

The pale shapes of the ewes rivered past us ... I ran the first sprint of endless running, crying Hyaw! Hyaw! as I tried to head the leaders. I heard the jeep gunning as Dad set out after another runaway group.

What we faced, if we could not bring the band under control, was a rapid steady push toward the steady devastation of our sheep ... they were aimed like an avalanche to the cliffs ... One way alone offered any chance ... try to funnel them along the bottom of the single big coulee ... to do it we would have to fight the sheep ... sideways along the punishing storm.

And so we fought, running, raging, hurling the dogs and ourselves at the waves of sheep, flogging with the gunny sacks, shaking the wire rings of cans ... we were like skirmishers against a running army.”

Psalm 23 has an inevitably pastoral sense to it, and for the most part we probably think of it as having to do mostly with still water by which the Lord, the Shepherd, is said to lead us. Yet when we leave it at that, we forget about another side of this psalm, the side which declares God’s presence when we go through the “valley of the shadow of death.” What is it that comforts us in such a time? Well for the psalmist, it was a rod and a staff, perhaps akin to a waving gunny sack and wire rings of cans. Perhaps there are times when God’s will for us can only be brought out in us as he skirmishes against the running army of our intransigent willfulness. Imagining us as a runaway band of senseless sheep — “the world’s most undressed creatures ... helpless to a storm” aren’t bad ways to think of it. Then imagine God as the One who, though we can’t understand it, can’t perceive it, knows what is best for us. Imagine God running alongside us, yelling “Hyaw!” and trying to move us to a safety we haven’t begun to comprehend.

It’s not just God’s amazing provision for our safety and well-being that we contemplate in the psalm. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me...” One of the features of the Ark of the Covenant that accompanied Israel as it wandered in the wilderness was the “mercy seat,” a plate of refined gold that sat atop the Ark. If the Ark was the traveling luggage of the God who journeyed with the people, the mercy seat was the most sacred part of it. In Exodus 25, God promises, “I will meet you there.” One preacher3 wondered, “Why mercy seat? Why not judgment seat? Or anger seat? Or jealousy seat? Or power seat? Why mercy — when so many often say mercy, compassion, and kindness were not attributes [associated with the God of the Old Testament]?”

What was going on is what we celebrate most about the 23rd Psalm, the reason we love it so much. Humanity was beginning to recognize that the God who created the heavens and the earth, was characterized, more than by any other quality, by mercy. Above and beyond anything else we believe or people tell us to believe about God is this elegant truth: God is merciful.

And God’s mercy was made manifest in human form in Jesus Christ, so that we may ever after have an example of the possibility that we, too, may live lives characterized by mercy.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me,
all the days of my life.

__________________________________
1 William Willimon, who shared this story in his sermon, “Good Luck?” preached at Duke University, April 25, 1999.
2 This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, by Ivan Doig, 1978: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, p. 217 ff.
3 John M. Buchanan, in his sermon “And Mercy Shall Follow Me” in Sermons for the City, 1996: Providence House Publishers, p. 89.