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.
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?
1 comment:
Amen
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