Preached on June 29, 2014
Scripture readings: Psalm 33; James 5:7-11
A little boy named Jimmy sat on a hilltop in a place
where you could see the countryside for miles and miles. The weather was fair,
and the wind blew, and the sky was blue and full of clouds. A feeling of wonder
gave him goose bumps. He felt the presence of God.
 |
| Photos of the journey toward Desert Aire Washington: June 2014 |
Jimmy said, “God I feel like you are so much bigger
than I am. I love you God. Help me know how great you are.” And God said, “Well,
Jimmy, to me a million dollars is like just a penny, and a million years is
like just a minute.”
Jimmy said, “Gee, God, could I have one of your
pennies?” And God said, “Sure Jimmy, wait just a minute.”
The Book of the Psalms is basically the prayer book,
or the worship book, of the people of Israel
There are words and thoughts in the book of Psalms
for anything in the human condition: anything you might feel that makes you
confused, or afraid, or ashamed, or happy, or angry. The Psalms are God’s
inspired invitation to tell him anything you are feeling.
This Book of Psalms, this book of prayer and worship,
gives us a surprising freedom in how we pray. It allows us to be bold. It
allows us to be scary. Think of the words that begin another Psalm; words of
worship at the start of Psalm twenty-two: “My God! My God! Why hast thou
forsaken me?” These are God’s words.
These are God’s permission for you to say the very
same words in your own prayer and worship. In some way the Psalms give you
permission to say to God anything you want, just as long as you understand that
God has the right to say anything he wants to you.
So, the Book of Psalms runs the spectrum of pretty
much everything that you could ever need in order to live as an authentic
worshiper of God, in this world. To be a true worshiper of God, with our roots
deep in the prayers of the Psalms, is to be very bold and daring people indeed.
Have you ever thought how bold and daring a thing it
is to say words like these words that we read in the Psalm this morning: “The
Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love?”
(Psalm 33:5) These are bold and daring words. These are scary words.
My first thought was that this way of seeing things
came from a special kind of faith; a high level of faith, an especially mature
faith. But it doesn’t come from a special faith at all. It comes from basic,
simple faith. The ability to say that the earth is full of the unfailing love
of the Lord is simply what faith is.
My copy of the Jewish Study Bible tells me that Psalm
33 is a part of the opening prayers of worship in Jewish synagogues, in their
regular Sabbath morning service. So these words define what worship is. They
tell us what it means for us to live, in this world, as worshipers of God. We
say: “The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of this
unfailing love.”
These are the thoughts of a simple faith. But they
are not necessarily the words of a simplistic faith. They are not the point of view
of someone who hasn’t lived or paid attention to the way the world really is.
When did the people of
When they lived in their own land, and lived by their
own laws, in the days when these words were written, they were bold and daring
words, because, often enough, God’s own people ignored the righteousness of the
Lord. Their land was not full of justice. God’s own people were the worst
possible examples of God’s unfailing love.
There is so much to think about here, but one point
is that this bold and daring faith is one of the sources of the courage behind
the American Revolution and the American Experiment. You would think that those
who believed that the earth was already full of the Lord’s unfailing love would
never have the drive or the gumption to do anything bold and daring. But enough
of the citizens of the first colonies had this faith, that it led them to
defend themselves against the taking away of their freedom to govern
themselves, or the restriction of the rights they had enjoyed for more than a
hundred years since their founding as British colonies. Faith gave them
gumption and made them bold, and daring, and active, and scary.
Because the representatives of the colonies, at the
Second Continental Congress, in July of 1776, believed that the Lord loves
righteousness and justice, they approved the Declaration of Independence where
it said that they were: “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the
rectitude of our intentions.” They could make that appeal to God because they
believed that God loves righteousness and justice. And their declaration said that they were
supporting their independence: “with a firm reliance on the protection of
divine Providence
They relied on God’s protection because they believed
that the earth was full of his unfailing love. And I have to say that they did
much more than rely on God. They lived, and they worked, and they fought for
what they believed in.
Their agenda was to practice, as a nation, what it
was that God loved. It was their recipe for life, as individuals and as the
nation that they hoped to become.
They didn’t know what would happen to them on account
of their boldness and daring. They didn’t know if they would live to see their
mission succeed.
They did believe that they loved righteousness and
justice, and that they could do what they believed was right and just in a
world that was full of the unfailing love of the Lord (even when that world
seemed set against them). They would do what was right and just, even though
they might die for it in a world full of the unfailing love of the Lord.
Another bold
and daring thing to believe, as worshiping people in this world, is the faith
that says: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” (Psalm 33:12)
One of the major forms of entertainment in the
colonies up to the time of the Revolution, and afterward, was the Sunday
Sermon. Preachers of that time often compared their community, or their colony,
to the stories about people of Israel
Preachers would compare the issues and temptations of
their day with the wandering of
The people of the thirteen colonies often thought of
themselves as Israel
A covenant is like an alliance or a partnership. It
is like a contract, but much, much more than a contract.
A covenant is more like a promise. There are some
promises that are so crucial, and so central, to your identity (the core of who
you are and what God created you to be), that, even when you do break that
promise, the relationship based on that promise does not come to an end.
Probably the best way to think of a covenant with God
is the covenant of adoption. It’s like a promise that is meant to be permanent.
It is possible, in a court of law, for any of the
parties involved, including the child, to annul an adoption; although it can’t
be done without a proven cause. And yet the fact that such a promise has been
made runs so deep that it surely cannot be forgotten. In God’s court of law,
God’s adoption of us runs deeper than the love of a mother for her child.
It says this in Isaiah. There God says, “Can a mother
forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has
borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See, I have engraved you
on the palms of my hands. Your walls are ever before me.” (Isaiah 49:15-16)
God’s adoption has its share of successes and failures, joys and sufferings;
but it never ends. God never forgets his people.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” is a
covenant like that. Abraham and his descendants were adopted by a God who never
let them go. They could un-choose their faithfulness to God, but they could not
un-choose God’s faithfulness to them.
The Americans of the revolution knew that they could
choose to be happy with God. They knew that they could choose to be unhappy
with God. They knew that there were those who chose to live without God: but
most Americans, in the beginning, knew that you couldn’t escape from the
consequences of living in a world created by God, a world in which God loves
righteousness and justice, and a world that is full of his unfailing love.
Was this a good thing for them? Yes it was very good:
difficult but good!
The colonists disagreed on some important matters of
faith; but most of them and their forbearers came to America
They believed that this would be good for them. They
also believed that it could be difficult. They might make many mistakes and
failures. And they might suffer for these. But that would be good, too, in the
end, because: “the earth is full of his unfailing love.” Where, after all, in
the Bible, is it ever smooth sailing when your God is the Lord? Ask Moses. Ask
David. Ask Peter. Ask Paul. Ask God himself, who came in Jesus to give his life
for the world.
We Christians, in
When we forget this, we get impatient, and anxious,
and fearful, and angry; and we go a little weird and wacko. That is why James
counsels patience.
He uses farmers as an example. You seed and you
harvest. You seed and you harvest. You seed and you harvest. You keep on
trusting that the earth is full of the Lord’s unfailing love. And the special,
successful discipline that comes from this is usually an antidote for weirdness
and wackiness.
The faith expressed in the Psalms, and the patience
in James, are the same discipline. As such, they are a cure for the weirdness
and wackiness that get a hold of us when we get upset at the ups and downs of
living with God by faith.
We live in a world and a culture of crisis, and fear,
and anger, and pride, and hatred. And yet we believe bold and daring things
like the earth being “full of the unfailing love of the Lord.” Do you believe
that the world, as you see it is full of the unfailing love of the Lord? Can
others see it?
There is a deep sanity and health in this. We forget
that the American Revolution was a long, and bleak, destructive, and (often)
almost hopeless war. There were far more defeats than there were victories. The
state of war lasted from 1775 until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. In
those long years our nation was held together most of all by those who held
onto faith and patience.
The best thing that could happen in our country today
would be for more people to become worshiping people who know the health and
the sanity of living by faith and patience. But how can they, until they meet
the God who became one of us in Jesus Christ, who lived, himself, by faith and
patience? How can they live with the sanity and health of people who can live
by faith and patience until they meet the God who showed his unfailing love for
this world by dying for all of the sins and evils of this world on the
cross?
What does America America
Can they see the real reason for what we do? Can they
see that our very reason for loving righteousness and justice is that we want
to love this world and all the people in it as God loves it? Can others see the
evidence that we want to be daring and bold about loving our world, and our
neighbors, with God’s unfailing love?
Until Christians themselves show this God and speak
with the voice of this God, until they show what it means to
fill this world with the same unfailing love that God has for it; how can anyone
else know what it means? Only then, perhaps, then, we can truly be the nation whose God is
the Lord?
