Transcript
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
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.
