Preached on Sunday, January 13, 2019
Scripture
readings: Psalm 38:1-22; Matthew 4:18-25
I’ve
never preached from Psalm Thirty-Eight before. And, now’s the last time I can
say that.
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| A Walk near Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA Dec. 2018 |
The truth
is that I have read this Psalm every year for many years, but (for this sermon)
I was reading it for you, so it was important. I opened the door to the Psalm,
and stepped into the shadows, and, all of a sudden, I found myself falling
down, and down, into a three-thousand-year-old brain. Well that kind of thing
happens all the time, when you read the Bible.
I asked
this three-thousand-year-old brain what was going on. As you can guess, it was
hard to understand him.
The page
in front of me (at verse nine) said, “I groan in anguish of heart.” But the
three-thousand-year-old brain was screaming something like: “My heart is feebly
sighing itself away, and I roar in pain at the mere sound of it.”
Verse
four reads: “My guilt has overwhelmed me.” The ancient brain seems to say: “I’m
in way over my head. I’ll never climb out this. I’m buried alive.”
Do you
like crawling under a house? The ancient brain in the Psalm feels like he’s
trapped in a passage under a house and can’t get out.
Verse
four reads: “My wounds fester.” The ancient voice seems to say: “My body’s a
stinking puss-ball.”
Well,
there’s quite a bit of that going on here, as usual. The ancient guy cries that
this is because of his sins. It’s because that sin made him so stupid, and made
his life such a disaster. Nobody wants to go near him. You know why. They’re
all saying: “I don’t want to remember him like that.”
This is
what he’s talking about. The funny thing is that he never tells us a single
thing about what he’s done wrong.
What sins
could go so wrong as his have? He doesn’t say. I probably wouldn’t want to say
what I had done either. Sometimes my sixty-seven-year-old brain does that.
The best
thing I can say about the ancient brain is that: “This guy needs help.”
To
shorten up this sermon: What this ancient guy really needs is for someone like
Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John to come by and be the fishers of men
that Jesus told them to be, and please, please fish him out his mess.
After
all, that’s what Jesus wanted them to do. Jesus was starting up his kingdom. He
was starting to fix the whole world. Jesus was fixing to start a whole new
heaven and earth. He’s not finished yet, but it’s our job to help Jesus, as
disciples just like the first ones: fishing people out of their messes, until
the kingdom comes. “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
(Matthew 4:19)
Jesus is
pretty smart and he must have deliberately looked for the fishermen first. If
Jesus had found Matthew the tax-man first, I don’t know what we would do with
the concept: “Follow me, and I will make you tax collectors of men.”
The
concept of “fishers of men” is such a strange thing because there’s something
in it that makes us sure that we know what Jesus must have meant by it. But it
certainly doesn’t tell us what to do with the people after you have hooked
them, or netted them, and pulled them into your boat, or in to shore.
Once
you’ve got them, can you ever be done with them? No! Jesus never works that
way. Fishing the guy out from under the house comes much closer, because it
really gives you a story that you both will share a part in as long as you
live. You can always relate to the guy you fished out from under the house. 
Jesus and
his kingdom (which the church is part of) is about much, much more than
seeking, and finding, and pulling people in. The next time we hear about the
kingdom of God, the context is this: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching
in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every
disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23) For Jesus, fishing for
people was more about helping them out of their old life and into a new life.
Scholars
argue over whether the main problem of the man in the Psalm was his sin or his
sickness.
Maybe it
was neither one. In the end of that Psalm, the guy seems to say that his
suffering and his sin came from trying to do what was right. “I confess my
iniquity; I am troubled by my sin. Many have become my enemies without cause;
those who hate me without reason are numerous. Those who repay my good with
evil lodge accusations against me, though I seek only to do what is good.”
(Psalm 38:18-20)
This strange
state of affair gives us two basic options. One is that this man has come down
to lying rather than confess his actual wrongdoing. But I know that God gave us
this Psalm here for a better reason than that. Most of us know that it’s not so
hard to do the right thing in the wrong way and completely screw everything up:
including those you wanted to help the most.
I go with
that one.
To be a
fisher of someone like that; to try to help someone who doesn’t know what to
make of his own actions; someone who has struggled so long that they have given
up on themselves and they just want to wait until God helps them know what to
think and what to do: that’s what it means to be a fisher disciple.
Everyone
else seems to have failed him. Everyone has put their two cents in and thrown
up their hands and left him to himself. What will you do if you are a real
fisher?
The
sin-sick guy of the Psalm is a person of faith who just needs God’s help. He
needs the kingdom of God to come to him and give him a new chance, and a new
life, and wisdom to live by. Speak Lord. “Come quickly to help me, my Lord and
my Savior.” (Psalm 38:22)
Someone
who belongs to the kingdom of God (like Peter, Andrew, James, and John; and you
and me) needs to come and fish this guy out (whatever that happens to mean),
and that could mean anything.
Any of us
can feel like someone trapped under a house and taking forever to find their
way out. Any of us can feel like a puss-ball. Even believers can spiritual go to
a place like that when they get worried, or fearful, or cocky. We go out on our
own and we shouldn’t be surprised at where this takes us.
Being a
disciple means helping people in their need. Their need can be not knowing who
God really is. Their need may lie in their not knowing that God, working in
Jesus, on the cross, is what gives us a new life and all the help that the love
of the family of Jesus can give.
The Lord’s
Supper is the gift of the Lord to call us to come to him for forgiveness, life,
and every kind of help we may need.
If we’ve
ever been trapped under a house, that makes us experts of going in and fishing
anyone out from there. Our having been trapped is like a certificate of
qualification for helping others in distress. Jesus earned his scars on the
cross, in order to save us from Satan himself, and sin, and death. Carrying and
dying on the cross is hard, dangerous work (like burrowing under a big, big
house) that qualified Jesus to rescue us when we are stuck under such a place
ourselves.
By the
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, our own scars can be made into our certificate
of qualification to be an official helper of others in their need in the kingdom
of God, signed and sealed with the blood of Jesus. The scars of the sins of
others may bring the strongest help of all, just as the scars of grief are the
strongest comfort to others.
Jesus is
building a kingdom full of Spirit-empowered little Jesuses running around and
blessing people with the help they need. If this is not true, then his church
is not being his church.
God, in
Christ, comes to us. He comes to the whole world wherever it hurts and wherever
it is going wrong. There, the Lord bears the hurt and the wrong and makes us
new people.
Jesus
goes straight to our need and gives us what we need. Jesus goes to our need and
makes us what we need to be for love’s sake. Because this love of Jesus knows no
limits, we ourselves can go to other people’s places of need. We can go to the
world’s places of need and bring what’s needed as only the wounded God, and the
fellow-wounded of Jesus can do.
