Preached on Memorial Day Sunday, May 27, 2018
Scripture readings: Psalm 46:1-11
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| Walking near Crab Creek, north of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA April 2018 |
In the Psalm we read this
morning, no clue remains as to who wrote the psalm, or when it was written,
except that it was written after one of the many times that war came to the
doorstep of Jerusalem and almost destroyed it. It was written by someone who
had stood upon the wall of the city, because everyone in the city had become a
soldier, and looked out at the thing that might destroy him, and everything in
life that was familiar to him, and everyone he loved.
It was ugly. There was a
heavy terrible smell in the air of fire, and old blood and gore, and fresh
blood and gore, and death. The air was full of sound: hoarse shouting, orders
barked, battle signals, cries of the wounded, the groaning and cracking of war
machines (catapults and battering rams) the whizzing of arrows and the rattle
they make around you when they don’t hit something soft.
There was a lot to watch,
as well, if you wanted to show your face long enough to take it all in: the
changing of troops, new trenches (within bow-shot now of the city) for the
enemy archers, signs of tunnels dug to undermine your walls.
How many are out there?
What are we up against?
There are too many for us.
The enemy’s bigger than we are. It was a human hurricane, an ocean of armies,
raging outside.
The defenders called their
home Mount Zion, but they didn’t feel as if they lived on a mountain now. Zion
had never really been a mountain. Now, the mountain felt more like a sand bank
in a rising tide.
Then, we aren’t told how
it happened, but the crisis passed. The enemy was gone. There were enemy dead
to be buried or burned, and their own dead to be buried. There were the
shattered weapons and the wreckage of war to be salvaged or disposed of.
There was exhaustion, and grief;
and relief, and a wild crazy thrill of hope that swept through them as they
watched broken spears and useless chariots consumed in bonfires. They had met
the impossible, the terrible, and they had come through it.
How had they done this?
The writer says that they had a secret weapon, a hidden defense within their
walls. He says, “there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.”
They had something on the inside that kept them going when things went wrong on
the outside.
An ancient city and its nation,
however high its walls, couldn’t protect itself or stick it out in a siege
without a permanent, reliable supply of water. This was a problem for
Jerusalem, because it had only one source: the tiny trickle called Siloam.
The spring Siloam was
tunneled under the city to be safe from invaders. When a siege was long, and
the cisterns were empty, everyone drank from the same small stream. It wasn’t a
river at all. It never had been. It was just barely enough. But it was enough.
The city, and the nation
it stood for, could rely on the stream of Siloam to refresh them when
everything else depressed them. Siloam symbolized all the gifts and traditions
that enabled them to hang on.
First, there are two
things that go together. Siloam stood for what was good in Jerusalem. Siloam
stood for what they had to be proud of. Siloam stood for everything that what
we call patriotism focuses on.
The odd thing here is that
what the psalm held onto as the great goodness of his people and his home had
very little to do with the common ideas of greatness. Siloam represented what
was small. The spring of Siloam was small, not a river at all, but it was what
they had. Jerusalem, the great city, wasn’t more than a town, and Mount Zion
was only a hill.
The good things in
Jerusalem were the little things. The greatness and goodness of Jerusalem weren’t
in its high walls, or in the palace that Solomon built, or the golden shields
of the royal guards.
Long ago, Moses had told
Israel what its greatness would be. He said, “What other nation is so great as
to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting
before you.” (Deuteronomy 4:8)
The greatness of those
laws didn’t consist of being an impressive system of do’s and don’ts. The
greatness of those laws were fairness, compassion, honesty, generosity, and
freedom, and protection for the vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, and the
alien. (Exodus 22:21-23)
It was a greatness that
they seldom appreciated. It was a greatness that they often broke. It was a
greatness of the heart that came from God. And that was the secret of where
true greatness lies: depending on God and imitating the heart of God who loves
whatever is little and calls the little things his home.
When the nation finally
lost that, the spring that refreshed them dried up: not literally or actually,
but it dried up so that what they fought for was a fiction. The truly memorable
sacrifices aren’t made for glory, and power, but to protect a way of life that
is found in what this world sees as the little things: a sweet little stream of
decency and compassion.
The writer of the Psalm
had a love for little Jerusalem, and its ways, because they were God’s ways
that loved the little things. It was a love of home, more than a love of gain
and glory. This is what made God’s people strong. This is what made the words
of the Psalm so beautiful. It’s the same thing that makes a family great. It’s
the same thing that makes a church great. It’s love.
The second thing the
stream stood for was unity. There was only one place to go for a drink, whether
you were rich or poor, young or old. You knew that you were all the same. You
were all in the same boat. You knew that you depended on the same things, and
you worked for the same things.
I think that Memorial Day
means most to people who simply love. They love the people who have loved home
and the little things that are beautiful and that are made to be shared by
people who will work hard and take care of others.
Memorial Day is about home.
Memorial day lives in people who have not let themselves be divided into groups
of “us and them”. It’s for those who have decided that we are all in this
together.
But the most important
meaning of the river whose stream make us glad is not a thing at all, but God
Himself.
“There is a river whose
streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall.” (Psalm 46:4-5)
The poet on the wall
thought, at times, of what it meant to fight for his little Jerusalem, that
huddle of houses, the women who gossiped in line as they filled their jars from
little Siloam, the families who were so great because of the way of life they
had tried to follow. This thought strengthened him, as he drew his bow, or
dodged the incoming arrows. If he thought about it, he realized that his life
actually depended on the fact that someone was fighting for him.
This was the secret for
hanging on. The good things that he loved: his land, his city, his people, all
that was good was there because God was there.
Of course, God is
everywhere, but these people tried to love goodness more than greatness. In
some strange way, God is great because he doesn’t care about greatness: God
cares about goodness in the little things and he stays faithful to that and
makes his home there.
The universe seems to
honor power or energy or creativity. But the unseen world values love. The
universe will come to an end, but the unseen world will go on forever, because
it is built on love.
The people on the wall of
the city trusted this. They had the will to fight the impossible battle because
they depended on this. There is a strength and morale that is boosted by
knowing that you stand for something, and by having confidence in it.
But it’s even more
important to know where this goodness comes from and to see our nation, our
town, our church from God’s point of view. God’s point of view is not from the outside
looking in. God is inside the things that are most worthy of love. God is
inside whatever is most worthy to worry about, even though God tells us not to
worry. God lives with those things and he is at work. We have to see this: “God
is in the midst of it.”
When we look at nations,
governments, cities, towns, churches, it might not be easy to see exactly what
God is doing, but we have to see God at work, and we have to make a commitment
to work where ever our Lord is at work.
In Jesus, God came into the
midst of things, of home, and town, and church or synagogue, and nation, and
everyone had to decide whether they would let him be there, in the midst of
everything with his heart on display, standing for the little things and the
little ones. Displaying his passion for the little things, he stood with them,
and with the scorned and the rejected.
The little things, the
little ones, the childlike, the vulnerable, the scorned, and the rejected stood
with him. Those who spoke most about power and being smart rejected him and
crucified him: and so, in Christ, God died for the sin of the world.
In our wars, in our
nation, in our towns, in our families, in our church we stand in the midst of
things with Jesus: or either with Jesus or against him. We have a nation which,
at its best, has stood for the little things and stood up against those who
stood for power, and gain, and glory. We’ve stood for the humble, and the
little, and the free. We’ve stood for those who needed grace, as people who
know that we need grace.
Part of the Lord’s grace
to our nation is that even those who don’t know him by name have still stood
with him for the little things. And, so, we have fought and lived, as one, for
these little, humble things that make families, and homes, and nations good and
worth fighting for, just as Jesus has fought and died for us.
Without knowing the Jesus
who was to come, the writer of our Psalm and the people of Israel needed to see
the presence of God at work in the heart of their nation.
We need to see where the
Lord is at work in the world as it is, and not in the world as we want it to
be. We need to see where he wants us to work with him in the little things and
make our home with him there.
