Memorial Day – Seeing God at the Heart of Things

Preached on Memorial Day Sunday, May 27, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 46:1-11

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.