The Narrow Gate

Welcome to the continuation of my blog, post-seminary. Ministry and evangelism have brought me back home to Chattanooga. I welcome your company on my journey.

The original blog, Down In Mississippi, shared stories from 2008 and 2009 of the hope and determination of people in the face of disaster wrought by the hurricanes Rita and Katrina in 2005, of work done primarily by volunteers from churches across America and with financial support of many aid agencies and private donations and the Church. My Mississippi posts really ended with the post of August 16, 2009. Much work, especially for the neediest, remained undone after the denominational church pulled out. Such is the nature of institutions. The world still needs your hands for a hand up. I commend to you my seven stories, Down in Mississippi I -VII, at the bottom of this page and the blog posts. They describe an experience of grace.



Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Day 1621 - Make a Joyful Noise! (It’s Spring!)



A version of a sermon shared with First Presbyterian Church in Spring City, TN, June 18, 2017.


Last week we learned how God’s New Creation by Jesus offers a response of grace to assuage my friend’s lament, “I feel like God is constantly testing me.” Today, let’s explore a postscript on that blessing of grace from the Psalms.
If there is one book of the bible most people know, it is probably the Psalms. If you just open the bible at the middle, you are likely to find a Psalm.  For all we have heard about Psalms, few of us read them so carefully to realize how emotionally packed they are.
Psalms are a conversation with God about life. You can find a good book on. the Psalms called Praying the Psalms by W. Bruggemann.) 
The Psalms are particularly a Jewish conversation with God that is a relentless expression of Jewish piety. It is a piety often tinged with anger or protest that modern Christians like us who usually have a very different idea of piety find quite disturbing.
We seldom are outwardly comfortable arguing with, or shouting at God. Yet, if we want the most benefit from reading the Psalms we must know a little bit about their context in the Jewish mindset and the creation of humanity.
The ancient Jewish mindset is rooted in (1) the creation story, (2) the story of Abraham, and (3) the story of Jacob whose name was changed to Israel, he who struggles with God. God created all of humanity and declared it all “very good,” yet God chose to single out the Israelites as his favored people and make a covenant with them a promise, “I will be your God” and a command, “You shall be holy.”
The Psalms are a conversation about the thousands of years of Jewish history with God, characterized by anger, celebration, resentment, compassion, submission, rebellion and selective memory. Some Psalms are angry demands from God for explanation or vindication that make us uncomfortable. They don’t conform meticulously to the Protestant idea about piety as deference to God, but if we can get past the discomfort, we find messages for us in the Psalms. If anything, the Psalms are written in pattern that mimics actual life itself (Bruggemann) and if read and used carefully help us cope with life. 
Think about it. Life is really a path of three experiences wherein we pass from a comfortable orientation, into a state of disruption or disorientation of our comfort zone, and then into a new orientation (and hopefully comfort). Often the pattern repeats multiple times in life, and sometimes we feel locked in the disorientation never getting to that last stage of comfort or reorientation.
When life was good, Jewish writers wrote psalms of praise, celebration and thanksgiving to God. When life was bad with disasters as threats to life, loss of a king, loss of freedom, illness and loomed, they wrote psalms of trust or pleas for help from God, or of lament or anger that God allows the disaster, and demand for justification.
We may get more benefit if we read the psalms as record of humanity calling on our Creator as we struggle to make sense of the changes in our life than as a record of history between God and Jews. John Calvin described the Psalms as “An anatomy of all parts of the soul.” (p 65 Brueggemann)
When we read a Psalm two things are important, what we discover within the Psalm and what we bring to the Psalm by our own mind and experience. Those two perspectives, what is written and what we feel, work together to create the message we gain from the psalm.
When you read a psalm that way, often you realize the psalm creates a new feeling or image within you not experienced before. The angry psalms dare you to ask of God and yourself hard questions about life, or to express emotions of great joy about life. All these experiences deal with those stages of comfort, of upset or disorientation, and where equilibrium and comfort is reacquired. The Psalms have a message for every stage of life.

Have you ever felt despair expressed in Psalm 22:14-15:
“I am poured out like water, all my bones are out of joint,
my heart is like wax, it is melted in my chest,
my strength is dried up like a piece of dry pottery and my tongue sticks to my jaws,
you lay me in the dust of death.”

Or, grief described in Psalm 6:6:
Every night I flood my bed with tears.
I drench my couch with my weeping.”

Or; the comfort and relief in Psalm 23:4
            Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;
            for you are with me;
            your rod and your staff— they comfort me.

Or have you ever struggled with the darker, almost radical Islamic vision that as Christians we must struggle to defeat found in Psalm 139:21-22:
            Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
            And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
            I hate them with perfect hatred;
            I count them my enemies.

I offer this perspective on the Psalms on life because there is within the Psalms a very beautiful postscript to last week’s sermon that God’s New Creation by Jesus relieves my friend’s lament, “I feel like God is constantly testing me.” This is how it goes:
At the beginning of this sermon, I said the crux of the covenant that God made with Israel was a promise and command found in Leviticus 19:1-2. This verse is the introduction to the Law Moses is about to give them: (“implied: I will be your God”) and “You shall be holy because IAM holy.”
As my friend knows, that command preceding the Law, “You shall be holy because IAM holy,” is an ultimate gauntlet or test tossed at humanity’s feet. And as we all know, the Law proves one thing…it is impossible for us to conform to it. That is the reality of our human nature. Sin convicts us and brings the judgment of death. If you will, it is the “test.”
That is a very dark comment from someone like me who regularly talks about grace. But we do have reason to celebrate: God’s steadfast love (hesed) never fails. Regardless of our nature we remain God’s children blessed by Jesus by coming to earth and perfecting the Law, erasing the penalty of death with the gift of grace in his New Creation.
We discovered last week that God’s grace frees us from the judgment of the Law through faith, and we ought to recognize that we, not God, “tests us,” because we can’t shake our sense of uncertainty or unworthiness of forgiveness. Thus, I suggest to my friend and us all that “We aren’t in Kansas anymore” is an appropriate characterization of that New Creation.
But, are we free to do anything now since we have forgiveness?
That is the Apostle Paul’s questions in Romans 6:1 and 15  ”Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?... Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” His answer is, “By no means!” because, of course, those seeking grace always measure us by our actions.
We are free of judgement through faith, but we will struggle to be free of sin until that final day of the Lord’s return when the Kingdom of God displaces completely the world of sin. Paul, ever the good Jew, laments in Rom. 7:21-25, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Then he rejoices, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Did you hear that, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
These words by Paul encourage use to recall to the three occasions of life: comfort, disruption and reorientation or a stage of new comfort that the Psalms concern.
Paul knows that first stage of comfort is knowledge of our creation by God, the giver of life. Paul knows that sin causes that second stage of disruption and grief that he so he so poignantly describes as “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” And he knows this new third stage of grace, the promise of the Future, when he exclaims, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Today, rather than stewing over whether God is testing us, and wallowing in guilt over sin punishing ourselves when the Lord has forgiven us, let us read and take Psalm 100 to heart:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
             Worship the Lord with gladness;
             come into his presence with singing.
Know that the Lord is God.
             It is he that made us, and we are his;
             we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
             and his courts with praise.
             Give thanks to him, bless his name.
For the Lord is good;
             his steadfast love endures forever,
             and his faithfulness to all generations.
Can someone give me an AMEN?