Psalms

Enter

Posted on April 10, 2022 by refresh -

Palm Sunday

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the LORD. This is the gate of the LORD; the righteous shall enter through it.

When my family and I lived in Washington, DC, we would often drive to worship on Sunday morning by going from our home in Chevy Chase, through Rock Creek Park, and down 16^th Street, which some people called, “The Avenue of Churches.” On that four-mile trip we would pass 32 houses of worship. I know because my children used to count them, and sometimes ask why we couldn’t visit one of those other, closer, houses, like the Buddhist Temple with all its colorful flags. Ignoring their requests, I once sent out a lighthearted invitation to our sister churches along 16^th Street that read like this:

Dear Sisters (and brothers, too, I suppose. We try to be inclusive):

I would like to invite you to join the willing and able members of First Baptist Church for a Palm Sunday Procession from Meridian Hill Park to our respective churches on Sunday, March 20, 2005. We’ve done this alone for the last couple of years, but think it would be much more fun (and meaningful, and ecumenical) if you would join us.

We gather at the park at 9:45 and begin processing downhill at precisely 10:00 a.m. We carry palm branches and wave them as we sing, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” (song sheets provided). We also visit with each other, enjoy the beauty of the day, and the interested stares of people passing by. Clergy are invited to wear robes and stoles (purple for the season) and whatever other impressive vestments they rarely get to show off in public.

Our custom is to arrive at the door of our church a little before the 11:00 worship service, bang on the door loudly, and shout (in unison) the following line from Psalm 118: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” We then process into the church, up the side stairs, along the balcony aisle, down the back stairs, and into the church again, accompanied by organ, brass, and timpani, and waving palm branches like mad the whole time. It’s fun, but feel free to do it your way when you get to your church. I hope you will join us.

Faithfully,

Jim Somerville, Pastor

That year I went to church early, parked my car, put on my robe and stole, picked up a huge sheaf of palm branches, and started walking up the street to Meridian Hill Park, a distance of just under a mile. Somewhere along the way a taxi pulled up beside me, stopped, and the driver jumped out and said, “Excuse me, Father. May I have a palm branch? I pulled one out of the sheaf, gave it to him, and said, “Bless you my child.” And then I went on up the hill.

No one from any of the other churches joined us that day. I had sent the invitation too late; they all had other plans. But still, it was a fun Palm Sunday tradition, and when I came to Richmond I tried to start it here. On Palm Sunday, 2009, some of the fun-loving members of First Baptist Church joined me as we walked from the Robinson Street parking lot to the front of the church and up the steps. We waited until the prelude was over, until it was time for the opening hymn, and then I banged on the door with my fist and we all shouted together, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through then and give thanks to the Lord!” And then I stepped back so that Wally Hudgins, our head usher, could open the door. Only he didn’t do it.

The door didn’t open.

We stood there in silence for a few seconds and then I stepped up and banged on the door again, and we shouted louder, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” And then I stepped back, and again, nothing happened. I turned to the crowd and said, “Maybe we’re not being loud enough. Let’s try it one more time!” And then I banged on the door till my hand hurt while we all shouted together, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” And this time the doors swung open, and we were all able to enter in. Turns out Wally Hudgins, our head usher, just loves a little drama.

But can I tell you how it felt to be outside those big, heavy doors on the front of our church, banging my fist against them, begging to be let inside to worship the Lord, and being denied entry? It didn’t feel good. It made me think about all those other people around the world and through the centuries who have stood on the wrong side of a closed door, begging for entry. In today’s reading from Luke 19, Jesus is presented as one of those people. It doesn’t seem that way at first. He comes up the long and winding road from Jericho with a great crowd of followers. He sends his disciples to fetch a donkey from a nearby village. They bring it back, throw their cloaks on it, set Jesus on it, and then Luke writes:

As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

But then listen to this: Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” And there it is: resistance. Everything is moving forward, the crowd is ushering Jesus, the obvious Messiah, into the capital city, but then, suddenly, “Order your disciples to stop.” It’s a reminder that behind every gate there is a gate-keeper: someone who decides whether you should come in or stay out. The followers of Jesus want him to come into the city and claim his rightful inheritance; the Pharisees want him to stay out.

And they aren’t the only ones.

It’s not only the religious authorities, but also the political authorities who want to stop Jesus. Because it was the Festival of the Passover, the annual celebration of Israel’s deliverance from slavery, and in that sense it was a kind of Independence Day—a Jewish Fourth of July—complete with the first-century equivalent of fireworks, and parades, and backyard barbecues. It was a big, noisy, exuberant celebration of freedom except that these people weren’t exactly free. Israel had been ruled by Rome for some seventy years. Roman soldiers occupied the city of Jerusalem and patrolled its streets. The Roman flag flew over the capitol. Nevertheless, tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of faithful Jews would stream into Jerusalem for this annual celebration, packed inside its city walls “like gunpowder in a Fourth of July firecracker. All they needed was someone to light the fuse.”^[i]

That’s why Pontius Pilate always came up for the festival from his headquarters on the Mediterranean coast, and that’s why he always came up with a full battalion of soldiers: he wanted to intimidate the people through a show of military strength. He wanted them to see that he meant business. Here’s the way Nancy Rockwell describes it: “Awesome stallions. Clanging hooves against the paving stones. Gleaming metal lances. Swords, dirks, helmets. Polished leather armor, saddles, boots. Drums. Pilate was marching his men because the Jewish Feast Days were beginning, and that stirred a restlessness in the people. He was sending a message: any trouble would be crushed. The Pax Romana, Caesar’s peace, would be enforced.”^[ii]

Behind every gate there is a gatekeeper, and in the City of Jerusalem, in the time of Jesus, it wasn’t only the religious authorities, it was also the political authorities. You can bet your last denarius that the Roman guards were watching this Palm Sunday procession coming down the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley, listening to the crowd shouting, “Hosanna to the King!” as they tightened their grips on their spears and thought to themselves, “What is this? We already have a king. His name is Caesar. And this is beginning to look like an insurrection.”

Maybe that’s why the Pharisees told Jesus to order his disciples to stop. They weren’t always his enemies, you know, not in this Gospel. In Luke 13 it is “some Pharisees” who come to Jesus and say to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!” And here in Luke 19 they might be saying, “If your disciples keep it up, with all this talk about you being a king, it’s not only Herod who will want to kill you, but Caesar, too!” Jesus knows that. He has known it since the last time the Pharisees tried to warn him. “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem,” he told them. And then he raised his voice and cried out, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’” (Luke 13:34-35). Well, now that time has come, and when the Pharisees tell Jesus to make his disciples stop he says, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

There is a certain inevitability to what is happening and Jesus knows it. He hasn’t come to Jerusalem to sit on the throne of his ancestor David; he has come to Jerusalem to die. The city that should have welcomed him as their king will ultimately despise him, reject him, and lead him out to the place of his execution. The gates will be shut behind him forever. But it didn’t have to be that way then, and it doesn’t have to be that way now.

Back during the worst part of Covid, when we weren’t able to gather in this building for worship, I once found myself standing outside after dark, looking up at that stained glass window that is lit up from behind. It’s an illustration of Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” So, there was Jesus, knocking on an unopened door, just as I had on that Palm Sunday back in 2009. I thought, “Look at that: not even Jesus can get inside the church.”

I was joking, but like a lot of jokes there was some truth to it. If you look closely at that window you will see that the door Jesus is knocking on doesn’t have a knob on the outside. He has to wait for someone to open the door from the inside. And here’s the truth: we are—each of us—the gatekeeper of our own heart. Jesus can stand out there and knock forever, but until we open the door from the inside, he can’t come in. Words matter, and the one word you could utter today that would make all the difference is the word enter. “Enter, Jesus. Come inside. I am ready at last to welcome you.”

Now imagine that the roles were reversed, that you were the one knocking, hoping that Jesus would let you in. He would, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t the friend of sinners and tax collectors drag you into the entry hall and hug you around the neck? Is there anyone he would leave standing on the doorstep? Probably not, and yet the same is not always true of his church.

When I was living in North Carolina I used to visit a Catholic monastery every once in a while for a 24-hour retreat. The first time I went the guest master showed me to my monk’s “cell” and I was relieved to find a comfortable bed, a sturdy desk, and a big chair in the corner with a good reading light. I was picturing something a little more austere. He invited me to eat with the monks in the refectory, which I did, and where I found that the women who cooked for them seem to think of it as a divine calling—the food was delicious! I envied the monks for their comfortable robes, cinched up with a rope belt that could be easily loosened after a big meal. I was also invited to sit with the brothers in the chancel for the many worship services they observed throughout the day but the evening service was special. That’s when the doors of the church were opened to the public and communion was served.

The guest master invited me to attend that service as well but made a point of showing me the statement taped to one corner of my desk. I can’t remember every word, but I do remember that it said the participation of non-Catholic Christians in Holy Communion would suggest a unity which, “sadly, does not exist.” In other words, as a Baptist, I could come to the service, but I could not take communion. And as a guest in someone else’s tradition I was fine with that until the service itself, when I was sitting in that beautiful sanctuary watching people get out of their pews and go forward to receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I sat there, thinking, “What? Did Jesus not die for me?! Would Jesus turn me away from his table?” I was getting angrier and angrier when suddenly I realized what was happening: I was learning what it felt like to be excluded. It dawned on me that this was what so many of the world’s citizens must experience every day—people who are denied opportunities because of their color, their gender, their ethnicity, their orientation, their annual income, or their level of education. As a straight, white American male who was reasonably affluent and fairly well educated I had hardly ever experienced that feeling. The world’s buffet table was open to me, but that night, in that candlelit Catholic church, the communion table was closed.

Rather than pretending to be Catholic, or demanding my right to be served, I decided to bottle up my rage and preserve it so that, for the rest of my life, I could remember what it felt like to be excluded, and feel compassion for those people who—through the centuries—have been told that they have no place at the Lord’s table, or even in his church. I’m sure Jesus himself feels that compassion—he who couldn’t even get into his own church during the worst part of Covid, and who on that Palm Sunday years ago stood outside the gates of Jerusalem with a crowd of his followers shouting, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!”

[i] Jim Somerville, “Behold Your King,” a sermon preached at Richmond’s First Baptist Church on April 1, 2012.

[ii] Nancy Rockwell, A Bite in the Apple, April 5, 2014.

Restored

Posted on April 3, 2022 by refresh -

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 126

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.”

There’s a verse from the Book of Revelation that I think of from time to time. It’s Revelation 21:5, where the One who is seated on the throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I thought of it just last week.

I have a friend named Bob who invited me to go sailing with him during the height of the pandemic. We drove over to the Northern Neck on a fall day, and even though it wasn’t the season for it Bob put the top down on his convertible so we wouldn’t breathe each other’s air. His boat was an old Bristol that a friend of his had bought thirty years ago in hopes of sailing around the world. But then his friend had a stroke, and Bob ended up taking care of him, and when he died he left the boat to Bob. It was a generous gift, but also a big responsibility. What do you do with a thirty-one-foot sailboat, in the Northern Neck, an hour-and-a-half away from your home in Richmond? Well, you pay a certain amount to keep it at the marina, and then you pay some more when they take it out of the water for the winter, and then you pay some more when they put it back in again, and every once in a while you invite a friend to go sailing, and it feels good just to get the boat out on the water, and put up the sails, and feel it moving beneath you once again.

Bob confessed to me on the way home that he doesn’t use the boat nearly as much as he would like. He feels that he isn’t honoring his friend’s gift. I said, “I could help with that. I love to sail. I’m not very good at it, but if you need a friend to go sailing with you I could be that friend.” It was a bold offer, but Bob took me up on it right away, and since then we’ve been sailing several times, far more than he would have otherwise. On one of those trips I made another bold offer: I said, “What if you and I struck up a kind of partnership on this boat, the kind where you pay the bills but I help you use it? You could teach me to sail, maybe even let me take it out myself someday. In exchange I could put in some ‘sweat equity.’ I could polish the teak and buff the gelcoat and get the sink in the galley working again.”

Believe it or not, Bob thought that was a great idea, and for the past few weeks, on my day off, I’ve been driving to the Northern Neck to work on that boat. I thought fixing the sink was going to be the easy part, but when I opened up that cabinet door and took a good look underneath I found parts of that boat that hadn’t been touched in thirty years. It looked as if the rubber drain hose had come loose from the drain, but when I tried to re-attach it I found that it had dry-rotted; it came apart in my hands. That was the moment when I thought of that verse from the Book of Revelation, when I was watching the dust from that broken, rotten, rubber hose float through the beam of my flashlight. “What if I had that power?” I thought. “What if I could say, ‘Behold, I make all things new!” and this hose would be new again? Even better, what if I could say it and this whole boat would be new again?”

Today we continue this sermon series called “Words Matter,” and making things new is almost literally the definition of this week’s word—restored. When something has been restored it has been brought back to its original condition, it has been repaired or renovated. It’s what my friend Mike does with old cars: he finds one sitting in somebody’s grandmother’s garage and then lovingly restores it until it looks like it just rolled off the assembly line. I’m not sure I have the patience for that. I want to wave the magic wand, I want to say the magic words. I want to touch that old sailboat and whisper, “Behold, I make all things new,” and find the price tag hanging from the tiller. But I do not have that power, and I know it.

And I’m not the only one.

Psalm 126 was written by people who were holding a rotten rubber hose, figuratively speaking. They had returned from their long exile in Babylon. They were standing in the ruins of Jerusalem, looking back on its former glory and wondering if it could ever be restored. And then they remembered that moment when they had been set free from their captivity in Babylon. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” they said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.” You almost have to hear the story again to appreciate it.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; its leading citizens were carried away into exile. Psalm 137 says, “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ But how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” I’ve imagined them looking toward Jerusalem every evening, watching the sun set over their former home, 500 miles away, and swearing: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”

For nearly fifty years they swore that oath, but one day they heard the sound of the Persian army marching toward Babylon, and when they looked up they saw a multitude of soldiers advancing: their shields and helmets gleaming in the afternoon sun; their swords flashing like lightning; their chariots rolling like thunder. They smashed through the defenses of the city as if they were made of paper. The Book of Daniel claims that Babylon fell in a single night and when the sun came up the next morning Cyrus, King of Persia, was in charge. And with one royal edict he set God’s people free and allowed them to return to Jerusalem.

Imagine being dragged from your home when you were still a child, leaving your fingernail marks on the threshold. Imagine living out most of your life in exile in a foreign land, being held captive by the Babylonians. Imagine looking out through the bars of your prison cell as the sun went down each night, longing for your heart’s true home. And then imagine that in a single day all of that changed, and the new king was telling you you could go home. Have you ever had one of those moments when you thought, “I must be dreaming,” when what you were seeing or hearing seemed too good to be true? That’s how it was for these people. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” they said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy. Then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them!’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.”

Imagine their excitement as they gathered up their few belongings and headed out through the broken-down gate of the city. Imagine the songs they would sing on the way home, and the stories they would tell about Jerusalem, their happy home. Imagine how they would camp by the side of the road at night, barely able to sleep, so eager to get going again and finally to get where they were going. But when they did they found Jerusalem a heap of rubble, the walls broken down and weeds growing up through the burned and blackened stones that were all that remained of the temple. It was a hard homecoming. All that laughter that had filled their mouths? Gone. All those shouts of joy that had been on their tongues? Silenced. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” they said, “we rejoiced,” but if you hadn’t noticed it before, that word is in the past tense.

I’m thinking of how it would feel for some of those refugees from Ukraine who have crossed the border into Poland. Suppose they got word that the Russian army was retreating from Kyiv, focusing its attacks now on the Eastern part of Ukraine. Suppose that some of those refugees rejoiced in that news, and got up the nerve to return home. But suppose that when they did they found their houses and apartment buildings in ruins, destroyed by Russian missiles. How would they feel as they dug through the rubble, as they discovered a daughter’s teddy bear, for example, soaked with water and covered with mud? It would have been so exciting to hear they could go home again, but this? This wouldn’t have been home at all. This would have been the ruins of home—almost worse than if they had stayed in Poland.

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” the Jewish exiles said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, then our tongue with shouts of joy, then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’” But now? Now we stand here looking on this pile of rubble and thinking about how much work is ahead of us. Now we wonder if the walls of this city will ever stand again or if we will ever worship in the temple. Now we realize that getting here was only half the battle, and that making it home—feeling at home—will be the real challenge.

We may not have the strength.

And this is the moment in the psalm where the word changes from restored—past tense—to restore—future tense. In the same way the exiles couldn’t do anything to free themselves from their Babylonian captivity they really can’t do much, or at least, don’t feel that they can do much, to turn this burned and blackened, weed-infested heap of rubble into home again. And so they pray: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negev” (and in case you’re not familiar with that analogy the Negev is a desert. Deserts don’t get much water and when they do, they can’t hold it. The rain comes down hard and fast and flows into watercourses that are bone dry most of the time, but during a heavy rain they run like raging rivers). “Restore our fortunes like that,” the people pray. “Overflow the banks. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.” And then, because it’s happened before, because the Lord actually did set them free from their exile in Babylon, the people begin to dream of future restoration as if it were a certainty. “Those who go out weeping,” they say, “bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.”

Psalm 126 is a Psalm of Ascent. It’s one of fifteen in the Book of Psalms (120-134) that the people would sing when they were making their way up to Jerusalem for the annual festivals. Just imagine how the mood changed for them over the years as they continued to sing that song. Imagine how in those first few years after their return from exile they could hardly go up to Jerusalem without weeping. When they looked on the devastation of what had been their home all they could do was cry. But as the years went by, and with the Lord’s help, the walls of the city were gradually rebuilt, the ruined temple was eventually restored. And as the people made their way to Jerusalem in those latter days their weeping was turned to laughter, and their laughter to shouts of joy.

It happens like that, doesn’t it? It takes time, and it takes God’s help, but it happens. I have a feeling that if we could look at what will happen in Ukraine over the next few years we would see ruined homes repaired and restored, office buildings and apartment buildings rising from the ashes, flowers blooming in window boxes once again and children laughing in the streets. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

Think about what’s happened in your own lifetime, those of you who have lived long enough. Did anybody here live through the Great Depression? Do you remember what it was like when the economy finally recovered and you were able to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again” and mean it? When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

Can anybody here remember the end of World War II? The Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, and in Japan a few months later? Do you remember the ticker-tape parades in New York City and sailors kissing girls on the streets? When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

I’ve tried to think of more recent examples—the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for some of you Carolina’s victory over Duke in last night’s basketball game, and for all of us this time that is beginning to feel like the end of a global pandemic. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

We can’t do it by ourselves. Honestly, I don’t think I can fix a broken hose on a boat by myself. But listen to the rhythm of this psalm and remember: “the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion.” Who did it? The Lord. He is the One who makes all things new. Looking back at what he has done in the past gives us confidence that he will do it again in the future, so that we can pray, along with the psalmist:

May those who sow in tears

Reap with shouts of joy.

And those who go out weeping,

Bearing the seeds for sowing,

Come home with shouts of joy,

Carrying their sheaves.

Amen.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 126

There’s a verse from the Book of Revelation that I think of from time to time. It’s Revelation 21:5, where the One who is seated on the throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I thought of it just last week.

And I’m not the only one.

We may not have the strength.

May those who sow in tears

Reap with shouts of joy.

And those who go out weeping,

Bearing the seeds for sowing,

Come home with shouts of joy,

Carrying their sheaves.

Amen.

Forgiven

Posted on March 27, 2022 by refresh -

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 32

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Today we continue a sermon series called “Words Matter” by looking at Psalm 32 and the word forgiven. Notice that it’s not the word forgive, which could lead to a lot of finger shaking and a stern lecture about how we need to forgive others, but the word forgiven, which is about how good it feels to come clean, to confess our sins, and receive God’s pardon. Two times in the opening verses David uses the word happy, as if the person whose sins are forgiven is doubly blessed.

It’s no accident that Psalm 32 is paired with the story of the Prodigal Son in today’s lectionary readings, because in that story the son comes to his senses, goes home to his father and confesses his sin, and as a result receives the kind of forgiveness no one could have anticipated. The father throws a party, celebrating his son’s return. Where there might have been weeping and gnashing of teeth there is instead music and laughter. “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,” writes David. “Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity.” So, what about you? Do you want to be happy?

You might need to confess your sins.

I visited my older brother Scott last week and as we were talking I asked him if he had ever had any experience with unconfessed sin. Immediately he began to tell a story about something I had completely forgotten. He said, “When you were six or seven years old you had this little plastic soldier with a parachute, and you would wind that parachute around the soldier and throw it into the air, or drop it out of an upstairs window, and it would float gently to the ground. You loved that little soldier and you loved his little parachute. But we were living in a house that had an office in it, and in that office there was a fancy ‘stapler’ that joined paper by crimping the sheets together. For some reason I tried to crimp the strings of that parachute, but I ended up cutting them, and you were devastated. When you found your little soldier, and saw that the strings of his parachute had been cut, you began to cry, and Dad came to see what all the commotion was about and when he asked me if I knew anything about it I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No.’”

I said, “Scott, I remember that little soldier and that little parachute, but I don’t remember the rest of that story. I mean, if you need my forgiveness you’ve got it.” But he said, “No, you weren’t the problem. I confessed my sin to you. The problem was Dad. I had lied to his face and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about it. In fact, I didn’t tell him about it until I was eighteen or nineteen years old.” Can you imagine? This boy who must have been seven or eight years old when he accidentally cut the strings on that parachute, lying about it to our father and then carrying the guilt of that lie around for ten years? And can we pause long enough to appreciate the fact that a little boy was plagued with guilt because he had told a lie? You don’t hear much of that these days. And I don’t know what Dad said to him when he finally came clean. I forgot to ask. But I’m guessing that Dad forgave him, and when he did Scott felt that rush of relief David talks about in this psalm.

David writes: “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” I don’t know what David had done, but it must have been something big, because in those few short verses he uses all three Hebrew words for sin.^[i]

The first one is Chata’, which means something like “failing,” or “missing the mark.” It’s when you pull back the bowstring, aim for the target, but the arrow flies wide. As I say to people sometimes, “Hey, at least you were trying to hit the target. It’s not like you were aiming in the wrong direction.” So, as sin goes, it’s not only the most common, but also the least offensive. My brother Scott, for example: he wasn’t trying to cut the strings on that parachute, it just happened (although I’m still not sure why he thought they needed to be crimped).^[ii]

The next word for sin is Pesha, which is often translated “transgression.” It’s when you break trust with someone, or break a covenant. It’s a word that is frequently used in the Old Testament, because God’s people were always breaking their covenant with him. It’s probably the word that best describes Scott’s sin against my dad. Dad trusted him to tell the truth, but in this case he didn’t. Dad didn’t even know it, but Scott did. It took him years to get up the courage to tell Dad the truth and try to mend that broken trust. And can I just tell you this? It is hard to mend broken trust. I have my own stories to tell about that.^[iii]

The third Hebrew word for sin is Avon, and it is often translated “iniquity.” It’s related to the verb Avah, which means “to be bent,” or “crooked.” Someone’s back can be bent, a road can be twisty. Avon is when you take something good and twist it into some perverted shape, and in the Bible (and in everyday life) that sort of thing happens all the time. When Dad asked Scott if he knew anything about my parachute he was hoping for a straight answer, but he didn’t get one.^[iv]

Now, as I said earlier, whatever David was feeling guilty about must have been something big, because he uses all three of the Hebrew words for sin. The traditional understanding is that he was feeling guilty about his adultery with Bathsheba, and that’s probably a good guess. When it comes to that first word, Khata’, David certainly “missed the mark” of being a good king, didn’t he? Good kings don’t sleep with the wives of their best soldiers while those soldiers are off fighting their wars, but that’s what David did. And when it comes to that second word, Pesha, David broke his covenant with both God and neighbor. First he coveted his neighbor’s wife and then he committed adultery—two of the Ten Commandments. And when it comes to that third word, Avon, David twisted the ideal of marital love into an ugly perversion. There wasn’t anything loving about what he did. He was simply using his power to take what he wanted. When it was over he sent Bathsheba home.

He thought he had gotten away with it until she sent word that she was pregnant. And then he tried to cover his sin by bringing Uriah home from the war, by sending him down to his house to spend the night with his wife, so that when the baby was born everyone would assume it was Uriah’s. But that didn’t work either. So he ended up having Uriah killed—another of the Ten Commandments—and after a brief period of mourning he took Bathsheba as his own wife so that when the child was born everyone would assume it was his.

And maybe some people did assume that, but not Nathan, the prophet. He’s the one who came to David and confronted him with his sin. He told him a story about a rich man who had very many flocks and herds, and a poor man who had only one little ewe lamb that he loved like a daughter. When the rich man had an overnight guest he didn’t take a lamb from his own flock. He took the poor man’s lamb, slaughtered it, and served it to his guest. When David heard that story he said, “The man who has done this thing deserves to die,” and Nathan said, “You are the man!”

As soon as David heard it he knew that his secret was out. He said, “I have sinned against the Lord.” But thank God the secret was out! Because any of you who have tried to hide your sin know how difficult it is and how damaging. David says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”

In biblical times there was an understanding that sickness and sin were related: that if you were sick, it was because you had sinned. The best illustration of this is the Book of Job, where Job loses everything in a single day and later ends up sitting on a heap of ashes, covered with sores, and scraping his skin with a broken piece of pottery. His friends come to see him, and for a full seven days they simply sit with him and say nothing. But eventually they begin to ask him what he has done to deserve this kind of punishment. He insists on his innocence, and if you’ve read the book you know: he is innocent. But they can’t get past the idea that he must have sinned and they keep asking him to spill it. “Tell us what you did,” they say. “You’ll feel better!” In Psalm 32 David does feel better. Nathan confronted him with the truth, and David confessed his sin, and God forgave his guilt. At the end of it all he was able to say, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity!”

As I said, it’s a good guess that the guilt David was feeling in Psalm 32 was his guilt about his adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of her husband. But there is one part of that theory that just doesn’t add up, and it’s this: in Psalm 32 David appears to make up his own mind about confessing his sin. After all that talk about his body wasting away through his groaning all day long and his strength being dried up as by the heat of summer he says, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.’” It doesn’t say that he was confronted by the prophet Nathan. It doesn’t say that he was forced to acknowledge his sin. It sounds as if he took the initiative and said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” Which means he could be talking about some other sin, and not only his most notorious one.

And I think that’s helpful. Because if you’re like me, you haven’t sinned only once. And if David was anything like me, he didn’t sin only once. Psalm 32 then becomes a kind of prescription for dealing with sin of any kind and not only the kind that makes the front page of the newspaper. So, what do you do with sin?

First of all, you become aware of it, and in the example we’ve been talking about it was Nathan who helped David see that what he had done was sinful. David may have already known that, but if he did he was keeping it to himself.
Secondly, you acknowledge your sin. Once David had been confronted he was able to own up to his complicity. After Nathan told him everything he had done David acknowledged, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Thirdly, you confess your sin. Our Catholic brothers and sisters practice this more regularly than we do. They go into the confession booth and say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” We Baptists probably don’t do it as often, but when we do we go straight to the source. We say, “Forgive me Heavenly Father, for I have sinned.”
In Psalm 32 that’s enough: David says to the Lord, “I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not hide my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
What happens after that is the joy that pervades this entire psalm. God forgives David’s sin and he can hardly believe it. It’s a taste of that amazing grace we sometimes sing about. It’s the experience of the Prodigal Son. David says, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity!”

This might be a good place to point out that just as there are three Hebrew words for sin, God has three ways of forgiving sin. In a commentary written specifically for preachers Old Testament scholar Stan Mast points out that the Hebrew word translated “forgiveness” in verse 1 has to do with “the lifting of a burden.” [When you preach this passage], he suggests, “work with the idea of struggling through life under the heavy load of sin and guilt. The next word is ‘covered,’ which suggests that God can’t even see the ugly blemish of our sin anymore. The end result, says verse 2, is that the Lord ‘does not count our sin against us.’ That’s an accounting term; think of God cancelling debt or, as Romans 4 puts it more positively, giving us the credit of Christ’s righteousness. The lifting of a burden, the covering of an ugly stain, and the cancelling of a debt are all images that will resonate with even the most biblically illiterate seeker. No wonder God’s forgiveness brings happiness unmatched in human experience!”^[v]

That Prodigal Son, for example. When he made up his mind to go back home I don’t think he was expecting what he got. He wasn’t expecting forgiveness; he was expecting to be treated as one of his father’s hired hands. But then he did what David recommends in Psalm 32. He became aware of his sin, he acknowledged it, and then he went home and confessed it. He said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired hands.” But the Father didn’t do that; he treated him as his son. Because the thing that had stood between them was no longer between them. The sin had been confessed and forgiven. And when that happens,

The party can begin.

[i] This next section is informed by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins of the BibleProject.com and their three videos on “Bad Words of the Bible” (see below).

[ii] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/khata-sin/

[iii] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/pesha-transgression/

[iv] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/avon-iniquity/

[v] Stan Mast, “Psalm 32:1-7 Commentary,” The Center for Excellence in Preaching (https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2016-10-24/psalm-321-7/).

Satisfied

Posted on March 20, 2022 by refresh -

The Third Sunday in Lent

Psalm 63

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Today is the Third Sunday in Lent, but this is actually the fourth sermon in a Lenten series called “Words Matter,” because I started on Ash Wednesday, remember? And I told you that in this season I would be preaching from the Psalms, and listening for the one word that jumped out at me from each one. I started with Psalm 51, and the word wash. And then it was Psalm 91, and the word shelter. Last Sunday it was Psalm 27, and the word light. Today it is Psalm 63, and the word satisfied. It’s right there in verse 5. David writes: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.” The image that came to mind immediately as I read that verse was one of my son-in-law, Nick, eating a full rack of ribs from Buz and Ned’s Barbecue, smacking his lips and making other happy sounds. Because he loves Buz and Ned’s, and he loves barbecued ribs, and when those two things come together it is a rich feast: an experience of complete satisfaction. But what the psalmist is saying is that his soul has been satisfied like Nick’s taste buds and stomach are satisfied, and I want to know more about that. What is the soul? Where do you find it? And how do you feed it?

Some of you have been reading through the Bible with me this year and watching the videos from the BibleProject.com that explain each book of the Bible and go into greater depth on certain words and themes. You may have seen the video on the word soul, which is only one part of a six-part series on the Shema, that famous passage from Deuteronomy that begins, “Hear, O Israel,” or in Hebrew, Shema Israel (I wish I could just step out of the way and show you the video, because it’s really well done, but I will put a link in the sermon manuscript so that when you look it up on the church website in a day or so, you can watch it).^[i] The narration is by Tim Mackie, who has a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies. He seems well qualified to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about the Hebrew word for soul, and this is what he says:

“For thousands of years, every morning and evening, Jewish people have prayed these well-known words as a way of expressing their devotion to God: ‘Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God the LORD is one, and as for you, you shall love the LORD your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength. We’re going to look at the word soul. The Hebrew word is nephesh. It occurs over 700 times in the Old Testament. The common English translation of this word is soul, and that’s kind of unfortunate. Here’s why.

“The English word soul comes with lots of baggage from ancient Greek philosophy. It’s the idea that the soul is a non-physical, immortal essence of a person that’s contained or trapped in their body to be released at death” (and this is where I wish you could see the video because it shows some kind of vapor going into a Grecian urn with the figure of a warrior on it, and then the urn is turned around, and you see the warrior has turned into a skeleton as the vapor rises out of the jar toward heaven). Tim Mackie says, “This notion is totally foreign to the Bible. It’s not at all what nephesh means in biblical Hebrew.”

So, what does it mean, Tim?

He says, “The most basic meaning of nephesh is throat. Like when the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, they’re hungry and thirsty, and they say to God, ‘We miss the cucumbers and melons we had in Egypt, and now our nephesh has dried up!’ Or when Joseph was hauled off into slavery in Egypt, his nephesh was put into iron shackles. But nephesh doesn’t only mean throat. Since your whole life and body depend on what comes in and out of your throat, nephesh could also be used to refer to the whole person.

“Like in Genesis, there were thirty-three nephesh in Jacob’s family, that is, thirty-three people. In the Torah, a murderer is called a nephesh slayer, and a kidnapper is called a nephesh thief. On the first pages of the Bible, both humans and animals are called a living nephesh. And if the life-breath has left a human or animal, the nephesh remains. It’s just called a dead nephesh, that is, a corpse. So in the Bible, people don’t have a nephesh; rather, they are a nephesh—a living, breathing, physical being.”

And then he says, “Now that might surprise you, because most people assume the Bible says the soul is what survives apart from the body after death. And while the biblical authors do have a concept of people existing after death waiting for their resurrection, they rarely talk about it. And when they do, they don’t use the word nephesh. So even though nephesh is often translated as soul, the Hebrew word really refers to the whole human as a living, physical organism. In fact, this is why biblical people can often use this word to refer to themselves. And it gets translated ‘me’ or ‘I.’ Like in Psalm 119, most translations read, ‘Let me live, that I may praise you.’ In Hebrew, the poet literally says, ‘Let my nephesh live, that it may praise you.’ By using nephesh, the poet emphasizes that their entire being, their life and their body, offer thanks to God. In the Song of Songs, the young woman constantly refers to her lover as ‘the one my nephesh loves.’ And of course, love isn’t just an intellectual experience. It’s an emotion that activates your whole body, your entire nephesh.

“This helps us understand the brilliance of other biblical poets who could combine multiple meanings of nephesh in one place. Like in Psalm 42, we read, ‘As the deer pants for the water, so my nephesh pants after you, my nephesh thirsts for the living God.’ So on a physical level, your throat can be thirsty like a deer’s, but then that physical thirst can become a metaphor for how your whole physical being longs to know and be known by your creator.

“Which brings us all the way back to the Shema. To love God with all your nephesh means to devote your whole physical existence to your Creator, the one who granted us these amazing bodies in the first place. It’s about offering your entire being with all of its capabilities and limitations in the effort to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. And that’s the Hebrew word for soul.”^[ii]

Now, call me crazy, but I think that kind of word study makes a huge difference in how we understand the Bible, and even how we understand ourselves. It helps to know that the soul is not an internal organ, like the stomach or the pancreas, and it helps to know that the soul is not an immortal entity, that somehow survives death. No, the soul is us; it’s you and me and everything in us; it’s who we are, not something we have. And that makes a difference in how we read Psalm 63, because then we begin to see the beauty of poetic imagery, and the power of metaphorical speech.

The Psalm begins: “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you (that is, “my nephesh,” and maybe here it should be translated as throat, as in, “My throat thirsts for you”); my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” I don’t know if you have ever been truly thirsty, but here the psalmist is saying that he is thirsty for God like someone who is wandering in a waterless desert. It reminds me of a story I heard my brother-in-law Chuck tell, about a time when he and his friend Lyndon were hiking in Big Bend National Park in Texas. Big Bend is a desert, and if you’re going to hike there you have to carry all your water. The recommended amount is one gallon per person per day. But a gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and if you are going out on a five-day hike you could, theoretically, add 40 pounds to your pack. Chuck and Lyndon decided to drive to the midpoint of their hike, hide a five-gallon container of water, and then drive back to the beginning. And so they started off carrying five gallons between them, about twenty pounds apiece, knowing there was water waiting for them. It should have lasted them two-and-a-half days, but it was hotter than they thought it was going to be and they were more out of shape than they wanted to admit. By the end of the second day they were almost out of water, with five miles to hike before they got to their stash.

They had just enough water to cook supper with a few sips left over to get them through the night. But they were thirsty, and by midnight they had emptied their water bottles. And then they began to imagine the worst: what if they couldn’t find that five-gallon container of water they had hidden? Or what if someone else had found it and taken it, or what if it had sprung a leak? What if they ended up in the middle of the desert with no water at all? Can you imagine how those kinds of thoughts would keep you awake at night, and can you understand why they broke camp at three o’clock in the morning and hiked the next five miles in the moonlight? But here’s the good news: they found their water right where they had left it, and they each drank until they couldn’t hold another drop.

That’s what it’s like when you find God, the psalmist says: it’s like quenching your thirst in the middle of a hot and dusty desert; it’s like drinking until you can’t drink anymore and then pouring a full bucket of water over your head. But the psalmist hasn’t gone to the desert for that experience; he’s gone to the temple. Because he knows that his soul is not an internal organ, nor is it an immortal entity: he takes his whole self to the sanctuary in the same way that many of us have today. Because his nephesh is thirsty, his entire being is parched, and where else would he go? “So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,” he says to God, “beholding your power and glory. And here’s the important thing: it’s not water he’s looking for, it is the steadfast love of the Lord, or in Hebrew, the hesed. That’s what quenches his thirst. He says, “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you (like someone who has just drunk his fill in the wilderness). So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.”

And then there’s that next verse: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips,” as if the psalmist had finally eaten after going days without food. And that made me wonder if any of us even know what hunger is anymore. Here in the land of plenty can you remember a time when you were truly hungry? Allison Collier has been trying to help us appreciate the spiritual discipline of fasting, but I noticed that not everyone was flocking to her Wednesday night class. The very idea of going without food, even for spiritual reasons, seems almost un-American. And yet it is an ancient practice, and it teaches eternal truth. One of the things it teaches is how to hunger and thirst for God.

I’ve told you about my own experience with fasting. The first time I did it wasn’t for spiritual reasons. It was because some group at my boarding school was trying to raise awareness about world hunger. But I decided to try it—to go 24 hours without eating anything. I was sixteen years’ old, and at the very height of my metabolic powers. I could turn a double cheeseburger into pure energy in about thirty seconds. Food was fuel for me, and I burned a lot of it in those days. So, to go without it, even for a few hours, was difficult. To go without it for 24 hours seemed like the ultimate challenge.

It was.

I won’t go into how miserable I was during that one endless day, or how many times my thoughts turned toward food. I will only tell you that the next morning, when I went down to the dining hall for breakfast, I loaded my tray with every good thing I could find, and then I wolfed down the bacon, the scrambled eggs, the waffles, the orange juice, the fruit cup, the muffin, the tall glass of milk, the second helpings of everything until I was stuffed. I finished my breakfast with one last piece of bacon and then pushed back from the table and praised the Lord with greasy lips.

That’s what it’s like for the psalmist as he feeds on God. He says his soul is satisfied as with a rich feast. He has come into God’s sanctuary to eat and drink until he can hold no more. But not only the sanctuary! Some of you know those places that “feed your soul,” but all of us know those moments when our soul has need, maybe in the middle of the night, when we cannot sleep. In those times the psalmist turns his thoughts to God. He says, “My mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.”

The final words in today’s passage are these: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” Maybe it’s only because I’m a grandpa, but when I read those words I picture my daughter Ellie taking my sleeping grandson, Leo, out of his car seat. Even in that unconscious state he will sometimes put his arms around her neck and rest his head on her shoulder, and she will hold him there with her strong right arm, as she reaches for her purse, his diaper bag, that other thing she needed to take inside…. But if I put a frame around that moment when she is holding him it reminds me of another of David’s psalms, the one that says, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child on its mother’s breast; like a weaned child, my soul—my nephesh—is satisfied” (Ps. 131:2).

[i] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/nephesh-soul/

[ii] Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, “Soul,” BibleProject.com (https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/nephesh-soul/)

Light

Posted on March 13, 2022 by refresh -

The Second Sunday in Lent

Psalm 27

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

Last week I started a new sermon series called “Words Matter,” and I started with the word shelter from Psalm 91, which begins: “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’” I told some stories about shelter: about the time I spent the night in a back yard igloo when I was a boy; about the time my friend Chuck and I rode out a violent thunderstorm under a thin sheet of plastic; and about the time my wife Christy and I camped in the Badlands in a tent that nearly blew away. In my charge to the congregation at the end of the service I said, “You who abide in the shelter of the Most High know that it is warmer than an igloo, safer than a sheet of plastic, and sturdier than a Wal-Mart tent.” But there was one shelter story I didn’t tell you, one I’ve been thinking about since then.

I can’t remember how old I was, probably not more than ten or eleven, but my family took a trip down south and we spent one night at Cloudland Canyon State Park in North Georgia, which I still remember as one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. We cooked our supper over an open fire, asked my dad to tell us one of his “Herbert Rabbit” stories, and when it was time for bed I crawled into my pup tent and wriggled down into the depths of a slumber party sleeping bag. I had put up the tent myself, and put it in a place where the ground looked nice and smooth, but I didn’t have any kind of mattress, and as I lay there I began to feel every root and rock beneath me, and there were a lot of them. No matter how much I twisted and turned I couldn’t seem to get comfortable. It took forever to fall asleep and when I did I think I woke up again every time I rolled over and felt those roots and rocks under my bruised body.

I didn’t have a watch, so I didn’t know what time it was, but at one point in that endless night I began to imagine that it was getting lighter outside. I thought, “Morning is coming! Thank you, Jesus!” I unzipped my sleeping bag, put on my clothes, and crawled out of the tent. I stood there for the longest time, looking at the silhouette of the trees against the slightly lighter sky, but the longer I stood the more I realized it wasn’t getting lighter outside. It was just as dark as it had been when I first stepped out. My brother Scott had a watch with a glow-in-the dark dial, but I couldn’t remember which tent he was in, so I just started unzipping tent flaps, reaching inside, and feeling around for a wrist. I startled one of my little brothers, who woke up and made a noise like a scared rabbit. But eventually I found Scott’s wrist, and his watch, which told me it was 10:30 p.m. And can I tell you this? The thought of going back into my tent, and lying down on those roots and rocks again, and suffering for another seven or eight hours, absolutely sucked the joy out of me.

Years later I saw an ad in a backpacker’s magazine that showed someone shivering inside a tent and asking the question, “Will morning ever come?” And immediately I thought of that night in Cloudland Canyon. But morning did come. Somehow I fell asleep again, even under those circumstances. Somehow I made it through that long, miserable night. And when I woke up the next morning, and saw the light of day, I got my joy back—all of it—all at once. I had never been so happy to get out of bed.

“The Lord is my light and my salvation,” David says, at the beginning of Psalm 27. He doesn’t say it because he has spent the night on a bed of roots and rocks, at least I don’t think so. He says it because he has been surrounded by his enemies, and in the dark he hasn’t been able to see them, he has only been able to imagine them, and the more he imagines the worse it gets. I was talking to someone about that last week, someone who seemed surprised that David had enemies. Wasn’t he Israel’s beloved king, the man after God’s own heart? Yes, but there was that whole period of time when he hadn’t become king yet, when the old king, Saul, was trying to track him down and kill him before that could happen. There may have been plenty of nights when David was hiding in a cave, finding it impossible to sleep on the rocky floor, knowing that Saul and his army were out there somewhere, creeping up on him in the darkness. David may have been whispering to himself like that man in the ad, “Will morning ever come?”

It makes you wonder how things got so bad, because there was a time when Saul loved David. You can find the story in 1 Samuel 16. It was after David was anointed but before Saul knew anything about it. Apparently the spirit of the Lord that had been resting on Saul came mightily upon David, but when it did it left Saul, and was replaced by an evil spirit that tormented him. His advisors said, “Let us look for someone who is skillful in playing the lyre; and when the evil spirit comes upon you he will play it, and you will feel better” (you know, “music soothes the savage beast,” and all that). One of them remembered David, a son of Jesse, who was skillful in playing the lyre. They went and got him and after a few days of hearing his music, “Saul loved him greatly.” He sent to Jesse, saying, “‘Let David remain in my service, for he has found favor in my sight.’ And whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him” (1 Sam. 16:22-23).

But that was before David killed Goliath, and before all the women of Israel began to sing, “Saul has slain his thousands but David tens of thousands.” That was before Saul was seized by a spirit of jealousy and tried to pin David to the wall with his spear, not once but twice. That was before David had to run for his life, and ended up at the Cave of Adullam, which is later described as a “stronghold,” and a “fortress.” The author of 1 Samuel says, “Everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented gathered to [David] and he became captain over them. Those who were with him numbered about four hundred” (1 Sam. 22:2). It’s basically the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, except that David didn’t have much to be merry about. King Saul, who had once loved him, had turned against him. He came after David with 3,000 hand-picked soldiers vowing that he wouldn’t return until David was dead.

It reminds me of a story I once heard Jim Forbes tell. Forbes is a well-known pastor, once ranked among the 12 most-effective preachers in the English-speaking world. He was at some conference I was attending when he began to talk about facing opposition from the leadership at one of his churches. It was a prominent church, one that had been proud of itself for calling its first African-American pastor. But now some of the same people who had called him had turned against him. I don’t even remember the reason; it may not be important. Whatever it was, it was enough to keep Forbes awake at night. He talked about tossing and turning, trying to put his worries out of his mind so he could sleep. His bed was probably comfortable enough, but it may as well have been the roots and rocks I tried to sleep on in Cloudland Canyon. Until one night, as he was lying there trying to sleep, he thought of Psalm 27. Forbes said the whole thing came into his mind at once, and although he had never memorized it he was able to sit up in bed and recite it, word for word.

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me
to devour my flesh—
my adversaries and foes—
they shall stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp against me,
my heart shall not fear;
though war rise up against me,
yet I will be confident.

One thing I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
to live in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter
in the day of trouble;
he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;
he will set me high on a rock.

Now my head is lifted up
above my enemies all around me,
and I will offer in his tent
sacrifices with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

That’s not the end of the psalm. It goes on for a full fourteen verses. But to his amazement Forbes was able to recite the entire thing, and when he was finished he was able to lie down and go to sleep.

Forbes told us that the words of that psalm never left him, and to that day he could recite them all. I remember hearing all that and thinking it would be a good psalm to memorize, especially if I ever faced opposition in a church.

And then I did.

I don’t need to tell you the reason; it’s probably not important. But some of the same people who had called me to that church turned against me, and I couldn’t sleep. In those days I learned what my absolute minimum amount of sleep was—four hours—because I would toss and turn until midnight, trying to come up with an irrefutable argument against the accusations of my enemies, and then, exhausted, I would fall asleep until four o’clock when I would wake up and start all over again.

It went on like that night after night, for weeks, for months. I would come home from work and tell Christy the latest development in the story and she would listen, patiently, but it put her in a difficult place because she couldn’t really do anything about it. She couldn’t go up to those people and say, “Hey, stop saying hateful things about my husband!” It would have only made things worse. So, she did the only thing she could do: she believed in me, because she knew me. She knew my heart. But God bless pastor’s spouses everywhere. And God bless Jim Forbes’s spouse, because she must have heard it all, too, and she may have been there on the day he opened the door to his office at church and found that someone with a key had opened the door, thrown all his books off the shelves, and propped a piece of poster board against his desk that said, “Go home, Preacher!”

At the church’s next business meeting things turned ugly, with people threatening him with lawsuits and even bodily harm, but in that moment Forbes got to his feet and right there in the middle of the business meeting he began to shout the words of Psalm 27 at the top of his lungs. “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear! The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid!” He recited the whole psalm, all the way down to its final words:

Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries,
for false witnesses have risen against me,
and they are breathing out violence.

I believe that I shall see the goodness of

the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord!

When he finished the room was silent and the meeting was over. I don’t know it for a fact, but I can imagine that when he went home that night Jim Forbes slept like a baby. And when he woke up the next morning and saw the sunshine streaming in through his curtains he may have said, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”

Which is ultimately what I learned in my own experience with church conflict. You know that night in Cloudland Canyon when I couldn’t sleep, when I was lying there wondering if morning would ever come? Well, there was something else I couldn’t do: I couldn’t make morning come any faster. I couldn’t increase the rotational speed of the earth no matter how hard I tried. Morning would come when it came, and not before. But it did come. It always comes. It came on that morning in North Georgia and it came in that conflict I was having in my church. It didn’t come because of something I did; it came because the Lord is my light and my salvation. All I had to do was remain faithful and do my job. Eventually those five people who were trying to get rid of me got tired of trying and left the church, and when they did things got better almost immediately.

“Wait for the Lord,” David says, and he should know. He had to wait a long time. But after seven years of running for his life, Saul, his old nemesis, was killed in battle, and the people of Israel came to David and begged him to be their king. He accepted, and ruled over them for another thirty-three years. He was the greatest king who ever lived in Israel, and the most beloved. Not that he didn’t still have some sleepless nights. It’s not easy being king. But even on the worst of them he must have remembered, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” And so he says to us, to all of us who are tossing and turning, wondering if morning will ever come:

Wait for the LORD;

Be strong, and let your heart take courage;

Wait for the LORD!

Amen.

Shelter

Posted on March 6, 2022 by refresh -

The First Sunday in Lent

Psalm 91

You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.”

Well, if you weren’t here on Wednesday, you missed it. You missed Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40-day Season of Lent, and the evening worship service where I started a new sermon series called “Words Matter.” Usually I wait until the First Sunday in Lent, which would be today, but for some reason I decided to start early and it wasn’t until I was getting ready to preach that I realized I didn’t have a proper introduction to the series. So I said something about wanting to preach from the Psalms during the Season of Lent; and about how, when you practice the ancient spiritual discipline of Lectio Divina, you read through a passage of scripture several times and listen for the one word that jumps out at you; and how, when I read Psalm 51 this time around (the one where David asks God to create in him a clean heart) the one word that jumped out at me was the word wash. So, I preached an entire sermon built around that single word that included the story of David and Bathsheba, and a funny quote from Calvin Miller, and an episode from one of the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (you may be able to find it on our website).

But today we’re looking at Psalm 91, which is sometimes referred to as “the Soldier’s Psalm,” mostly because of verses 5-7. Listen:

You will not fear the terror of the night,
or the arrow that flies by day,
Or the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.

I found a story online about a brigade commander in WWI who gave his men a little card with Psalm 91 printed on it and asked them to recite it daily. The story goes that after they started doing that they were involved in three of the bloodiest battles in WWI yet suffered no casualties in combat despite other brigades suffering as much as ninety percent.^[i] The writer who shared that story mentioned that there is a good bit of dispute about whether or not it is true, but either way it reveals some of the mystique that has grown up around Psalm 91. “There seems to be a real fascination with this particular psalm as a prayer of protection,” he wrote. “It has been printed on bandanas to give to people going on operations. It has also been stamped onto military dog tags.”^[ii]

Psalm 91 has become a kind of “lucky charm” for soldiers and you can see why. The author claims that if you make God your refuge and your fortress, “No evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.” And then there’s the line that links this Psalm to today’s Gospel lesson, where the Devil himself quotes scripture by saying to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God throw yourself off the pinnacle of the temple, for it is written (in Psalm 91), ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” It’s tempting, isn’t it? To think that if you just pray Psalm 91 every day no harm will come to you? But as I wrote in my notes, “This sounds like the song of a soldier who has just dodged a bullet.”

I was thinking of that scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” where a young soldier feels the thud of a bullet against his helmet, takes it off, looks at the deep dent, and shows his friends how he nearly got killed. And then, while he is still marveling at his good fortune, still holding his helmet in his hands, gets hit by a second bullet in the middle of his forehead. He dies instantly. If it had only been that first bullet he might have written to his girlfriend that night, “A thousand may fall at my side, ten thousand at my right hand, but it will not come near me.” As it was, he wasn’t able to write a thing.

But the Bible was not written only by the bullet-dodgers. Turn back in your Bibles just three chapters, to Psalm 88, and you will hear a different story altogether.^[iii] Psalm 91 says, “No harm will come near to you.” Psalm 88 says, “From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death . . . I am filled with despair.” Psalm 91 concludes with “He will call upon me and I will answer.” Psalm 88’s last line is “You have taken my loved ones from me; the darkness is my best friend.” Remember that when Jesus was dying on the cross it wasn’t Psalm 91 he was quoting, but Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Bible is real. It was written by real people. It tells the truth about those moments when we feel as if we have dodged a bullet and those moments when we know we haven’t.

But the word that jumped out at me as I read through Psalm 91 this time around was not a word of protection against “the arrow that flies by day,” it was that word in the opening verse, shelter, and the idea that we human beings could “live in the shelter of the Most High, and abide in the shadow of the Almighty.” Because I’ve had some experience with shelter; I know how comforting it can be.

Have I told you about the time I spent the night in an igloo? We had a heavy snowfall once when I was growing up in West Virginia. The snow was wet enough to pack easily and make good snowballs, and after my brothers and I had exhausted ourselves in a snowball fight we went inside, made some snow ice cream, and came up with the idea of building an igloo in the backyard. It was so easy! We just packed snow into a plastic dishpan to make snow bricks, and then stacked them up in a big circle that got smaller and smaller as we neared the top. My brother, Scott, had to stand inside and let us use his back as a temporary support to get those last few bricks into place, but when we were finished we had an igloo that any Inuit would be proud of, and I volunteered almost immediately to spend the night in it.

It got cold that night. I was deep inside my sleeping bag, thinking that it was much warmer than I had thought it was going to be, but also colder than I would have liked. So I crawled to the opening, stuck my head out, and whistled for our three dogs—Caspian, Glory, and Fang—and they came racing out of the barn and into the igloo, and finally down into my sleeping bag where they kept me warm all night. When I came in for breakfast the next morning Dad asked me how things had gone and I said, “Fine, but now I know what they mean when they talk about a ‘three-dog night.’”^[iv]

And then there was the time my brother-in-law Chuck and I went backpacking in the Cranberry Backcountry and didn’t take a tent. We were trying a different approach in those days, an ultralight approach where we slept in backpackers’ hammocks under a sheet of plastic that served as a rain fly. We found a lovely place to string our hammocks, in a little hollow between the hills where there were three sturdy trees, perfectly spaced. We tied one end of both hammocks to one tree, and then tied the other end to separate trees. We lashed a pole up high between those trees, and then tied a ridgeline from that pole to the first tree so that we could throw that piece of plastic over it and make a roof for our little nest. We cooked supper and then, while it was still daylight, climbed into our hammocks to settle in for the night. And it was wonderful, except that we had seen some evidence of bear activity during the day, and we felt a little too much like pieces of ripe fruit hanging there, waiting to be picked.

But then—Oh my!—we experienced the thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms. The sky turned black, and the lightning began to flash and the rain began to come down as if we had set up camp under Niagara Falls. And, have I told you this? That sheet of plastic, that thin sheet of plastic, was clear, so that we could see every flash of lightning, and the thunder came so close behind it, and so loud, it was like a bomb going off every time it happened. And that cozy little hollow we were sleeping in became the watershed for all the rain that was falling on the mountain until it was like a river raging beneath us while the storm raged above us. At one point Chuck yelled to me, from a distance of three feet, “At least we don’t have to worry about bears!” And he was right. And with that thought in our heads we drifted off to sleep on what is still number one on our list of most memorable nights in the woods.

But then just last year, when Christy and I were on sabbatical, we spent two nights camping in the Badlands of South Dakota. I try to spoil Christy when I take her camping. I don’t use my little backpacking tent; I use the big, room-sized tent I bought at Wal-Mart. And I blow up one of those queen-size air beds that inflates to a height of 18 inches. And I put on the 600-thread-count cotton sheets, and the feather pillows, and the down comforter. I want her to think she’s sleeping at the Ritz. Our first night was perfect. The temperature was just cool enough to appreciate the down comforter and the airbed stayed properly inflated all through the night. We woke up to sunshine and bird song, a delicious hot breakfast and a leisurely tour of the national park.

But the next night was different. The wind had picked up through the day and by the time we got back to our campsite it was blowing at 40 miles per hour. Our tent was bowing down beneath the force of it and I began to wonder if the stakes would hold. I tried to park our car beside it, to serve as a wind break, but the park ranger told me I couldn’t do that. Eventually we climbed into the tent and hoped for the best, but that was before it started to rain. It rained hard all through the night, and the wind never let up. At one point the side of the tent was flattened against Christy’s cheek while rain pummeled it from the other side. She was trying very hard to be brave but I could also tell that she was not enjoying it. I leaned in close and began to sing into her ear that old spiritual, “The Storm is Passing Over,” and she said, “No, it’s not!”

But it did.

In the early hours of the morning the rain stopped, the wind died down, and we made it through the night. When I unzipped the tent flap and stepped outside the next morning everything was wet. Our campsite looked like a disaster area. One of the fiberglass tent poles had shattered under the stress of the storm. But here was the miracle: the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and we were safe and warm and dry.

“You who live in the shelter of the Most High,” says the psalmist, “who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’” Christy and I weren’t quite ready to say it yet, and if you read on down to verse 10 where it says, “No evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent,” we would have had to disagree. The scourge had come near our tent; the evil had befallen right on top of it. And yet we were alive and well, blinking in the bright sunshine of a brand new day. It makes me wonder if that’s what the psalmist is talking about: that if you make the Lord your refuge and fortress, your God in whom you trust, then you won’t have to be afraid, no matter what comes.

Even if you don’t dodge the bullet.

I remember going to see someone at the hospital once, someone who was dying. My daughter Catherine was with me and she was only five years old. But she liked to come to that particular hospital because, in the gift shop, they sold penny candy (for those of you born after 1926, “penny candy” is candy you can buy for a penny). I’m not sure why they did it there, but they did. So, I bought her a piece, and then I played a game with her. I said, “You hold on to the candy and let me see if I can get it out of your hand.” And I am not joking: she held on so tightly that I could not pry her fingers loose, I could not get the candy away. When I went upstairs a few minutes later I told that story to the man who was dying, and then I said, “Years ago, you put your life into God’s hand. If a little girl can hold on to a piece of penny candy so tightly that a grown man can’t get it away from her, how much more can God hold on to your life? Nothing, not even death, will be able to snatch it out of his hand.”

Maybe, for those of us who live in the shelter of the Most High, the experience of dying is like that experience Christy and I had in the Badlands, where the wind blows and the rain falls and the storm howls and you don’t know if you will survive it. Maybe you don’t survive it. But maybe you wake up on the other side of death and find that God has held onto your life all through that long and stormy night, and when you unzip the tent flap, and step outside, you find yourself blinking in the bright light of heaven, with the sun shining, and the birds singing, forever and ever.

Amen.

[i] “Psalm 91: The Soldier’s Psalm,” published on the website of the Military Christian Fellowship of Australia by an author referred to only as “BBADMIN” (https://mcf-a.org.au/articles/the-soldiers-psalm/).

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] I am grateful to Scott Hoezee for this insight, found in his commentary on Psalm 91on the Center for Excellence in Preaching website (https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2022-02-28/psalm-911-29-16/).

[iv] “Three Dog Night” was the name of a band popular in those days and somehow, miraculously, still around. Their website explains: “The band’s now-famous name refers to native Australian hunters in the outback who huddled with their dogs for warmth on cold nights; the coldest being a ‘three dog night.’” So, there you go. (https://www.threedognight.com/bio).

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