Psalm 8; 144:3-4      Job 25:4-6

Many people are impatient with theology. They regard theology as utterly abstract and uselessly otherworldly. Theology, they assume, has to do with dotting i’s and crossing t’s. But help people? give hope to people? even save people? Since when did i’s and t’s save anyone?

But in fact theology isn’t utterly abstract and uselessly otherworldly. Theology is the discipline of reflecting upon the truth of the living God. And God is neither abstract nor otherworldly. God is concrete. God is the reality with which all of us collide and wrestle and which we sometimes deny; and God remains that reality which none of us can ever escape.

Make no mistake. When a theology of nature, for instance, is dismissed nature becomes a giant garbage pail slowly gathering up lethal chemicals.

When a theology of history is ignored we give up the struggle to lend visibility to the kingdom of God and instead make our peace with the kingdom of evil even as it savages us.

What about a theology of humankind? What are man and woman? Who are we, anyway? Are we merely two-legged featherless creatures whose toys and tools are a bit more sophisticated than those of a monkey? Are we simply the cold-blooded killers the man from eastern Europe told me we are after he himself had been victimized by both nazis and communists? Or are we simply angelic creatures of superior rationality? C.S. Lewis has pointed out that when people believe they are only animals they behave like animals. And yet paradoxically when they believe they are near-angelic their behaviour becomes near demonic. Theology — our reflection upon the truth of God — matters. Whether explicit or implicit it governs how we view ourselves, what we do to other people, and whether there is hope for any of us.

The important theological question, “What is man?”, is asked several times in the Hebrew bible. Today we are going to probe several of the answers given this question.

I: — “What is man that you, God, are mindful of him and care for him?” Answer: “I have made him little less than God, and have crowned him with glory and honour.” All men and women are the pinnacle of God’s creation, higher than anything else God has made, only slightly lower than God himself and crowned (the fact that we are crowned means that everyone is meant for the royal family; before God there are no commoners) crowned with a glory and an honour which no one else can snatch from us and which we cannot even forfeit ourselves. This is what we are.

It’s important that we understand we are created with a dignity we can neither lose accidentally nor fritter away foolishly nor give up disgustingly nor be robbed of helplessly. To be sure, we can always behave in such a way as to contradict this dignity, and other people can treat us so as to deny it, but by God’s ordination it is ours, and is ours forever.

Think of the situations where our society implicitly recognizes humankind’s ineradicable glory/honour/dignity and explicitly pays dearly to uphold it: the convict, for instance. One person in a penitentiary costs us (i.e., taxpayers) $55,000 per year. When a new jail is built the cost is $285,000 per cell.

From time-to-time my wife has a child in her class who is severely challenged, whether physically or emotionally. A teacher’s aide is provided (taxpayer’s expense) who assists the child with getting around, getting to the toilet, getting winter clothes on and off; or else the teacher’s aide attempts to defuse explosions hidden away in the child’s psyche, and then attempts to console the child and others whenever defusing doesn’t work and there is emotional shrapnel spewing in all directions.

What does our society spend on the aged, the infirm (who may be young), the deranged, the new-born with the birth-defect? What do we spend on people who are socially unproductive and will never come close to paying their own way? And why do we spend it? Because despite the explicit secularism of our society there is an implicit theology at work: any human being is created only less than God, and is crowned with glory and honour.

We must not think that everyone knows innately what the psalmist tells us. Conviction of the glory and honour of humankind is not innate; conviction of this truth is fostered by the gospel. Where a society isn’t illumined by the indirect lighting of the gospel, or is no longer illumined by the indirect lighting of the gospel, people are regarded as tools to be used while useful and discarded when not. Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and historian, asks, “Do you have difficulty imagining what becomes of people in a society which is no longer controlled, even unconsciously, by the indirect illumination of the gospel? Ask me”, says Solzhenitsyn, “ask me. I have lived in such a society myself!”

In the war between China and Japan just prior to World War II it was learned that the Japanese estimated how long it would take a wounded soldier to recover and return to combat, and then decided whether or not the wounded soldier would be given medical treatment. If his injuries were such that he would be unavailable for several months — as was the case with a broken femur — he was shot in the head by his own people.

How different it was in a society illumined by the gospel for centuries. When I was a young teenager I was fascinated with accounts of the Battle of Britain. One aspect of it, however, didn’t fascinate me as much as it amazed me. Injured enemy fliers who had been shot down in the course of bombing defenceless civilians were themselves given the very best medical treatment available in Britain. If the flier had glass fragments in his eye and he needed the world’s best ophthalmologist, he got the world’s best ophthalmologist, even if there was a lineup of British citizens who needed medical treatment but whose condition was less urgent. This, I thought as a 14-year old, was the height of irrationality. It is the height of irrationality — unless even our worst enemy is someone who cannot forfeit the glory and honour and dignity in which he or she was created.

Theology matters. Imagine a society where such truth and reflection upon such truth disappear completely.

II: — What is man? woman? “Man is like a breath”, says the psalmist in his second answer, “man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” In other words, we are short-lived creatures for whom life passes speedily; in addition, we are vulnerable creatures for whom life unfolds perilously.

Our days are like a passing shadow. Once we see this we can react in two quite different ways. One way is the way of fatalism and indifference. “Since life passes so very quickly, what is the point of doing anything? of exerting ourselves anywhere? Why not sit back and let the passing shadow pass?”

The other way is the way of biblical faith. Just because life is but a breath and our days a passing shadow, every moment has eternal significance. Every moment is an opportunity for mirroring the truth of God. Every moment is unique, pregnant, unrepeatable. Every moment can be a window opening on the God who sends rain on just and unjust alike. What occurs in any moment can have consequences beyond anything we might imagine.

Several times I have said from this pulpit that the day came for me when I realized that I could control almost nothing; could influence a great deal, to be sure, but control almost nothing. I used to think this was so because of my social situation. But someone like the Chief Executive Officer of a major corporation, the grand boss, someone whose social situation wasn’t mine; he could control eversomuch! Then one day I learned that a CEO in Canada lasts 3.5 years (on average), whereupon he is fired. What does he control then? What did he control earlier? Not even enough to keep himself from being fired! And the hightest political authorities? How much can the prime minister control? If the American government raises interest rates tomorrow there will be huge consequences for every dimension of Canadian life. And the prime minister will have no control whatever over the move made by our American friends or over the consequences of it for Canadians.

Because my life is a breath and my days a passing shadow I have to realize that I have only a few breaths in which to be. I don’t have to do something dramatic or eye-catching. I have to be. It’s my “be-ing” that will prove to be my greatest influence.

In the midst of “passing shadows” I often feel I am endlessly jostled by semi-anonymous people. The woman from the Ontario Housing Development who needs a few dollars because her child is sick and what the sick child needs is just enough to put the family finances below the line this month.

The schizophrenic fellow who wants to talk to me not because he has urgent information to convey but because he’s lonely and can’t understand why people weary of and walk away from his pillar-to-post ramblings.

I start to feel that all of this is crowding out the really important work I am supposed to be about.

Then I recall the master himself on his way to the house of Jairus who was the president of the synagogue. Jesus is going to the man’s house because the man’s daughter is sick unto death. As Jesus walks resolutely through the crowds an unnamed woman reaches out and touches him. Doesn’t she know he’s hurrying to make a housecall before a young girl dies? She doesn’t know this. How could she? But surely she can see how busy he is. “Hold it!”, says Jesus to impatient disciples accompanying him, “someone has touched me. Some one person has reached out to me. Let’s stop here and deal with this.”

Then I remember the people who have delayed in order to be kind to me. I’m not talking now about the people who have assisted me dramatically on the two occasions I was injured on the street and needed an ambulance to get to the hospital. I’m talking about the unnamed people who have gladly inconvenienced themselves in order to help me, therein mirroring our Lord himself.

The clerk at the Lufthansa counter in Frankfurt, Germany when my pick-up didn’t show up and the Frankfurt telephone directory had defeated me and I couldn’t find the village of Arnoldshain in the Frankfurt directory inasmuch as I had been given the wrong spelling of “Arnoldshain”.

The “bag lady” who welcomed me to her table in the doughnut shop when I was an undercover journalist in Parkdale. Sure she was deranged. But who ever said you had to be sane in order to be helpful? This 25-year old woman was unafraid, and assumed that I, grubby as I was, was another needy person as needy as she.

Wherever I have been in life I have found no shortage of people who were kind to me. (I didn’t say “everyone”: I have met my share of curdled spirits. I said “no shortage”, a sufficient number of kind people.) They have intuited, even if they never thought about it consciously, that because life is but a breath and our days a passing shadow, the only time we have to exemplify God’s truth and mercy and faithfulness is now. This moment is unique and is fraught with eternal significance.

III: — “What is man?” The book of Job gives a third answer: “A maggot, a worm.” Wait a minute! I thought we were little less than God, crowned with glory and honour! And now a maggot, a worm? Actually, it is no putdown, no belittlement of us. To understand what is said we must first hear the question it answers. “How can anyone be innocent? (NEB) or clean? (RSV). Can anyone be righteous or pure in God’s sight? (NIV) Maggot! Worm!” It’s the writer’s way of reminding us that we sinners are defiled before God.

I am the last person to belittle what the psychologists tell us about the importance of positive self-image and and self-confidence and ego-strength. The person whose self-confidence has eroded utterly or who has never had any is a truly pathetic creature. Then what are we to make of “Maggot, Worm!”, especially when we all know that maggots frequent rottenness and worms frequent excrement? Is scripture simply fostering a negative self-image, destroying what little self-confidence we have, and ruining the ego-strength we’ve struggled for years to build up?

Not at all. When scripture pronounces us “Maggot, worm!”, it is reminding us that sin defiles; we are defiled before a holy God. Defilement is always loathsome. We are loathsome to God. Our sin revulses him. Specifically sin’s defilement deprives us of our access to God; sin’s defilement disqualifies our acceptance with God.

Yet the marvel of God’s grace is that as loathsome as our sin renders us to him, he has made provision for us in the cross of that Son who identifies himself with the loathsome. The paradox of grace is that the more loathsome we are to God the more he longs for us. The glory of the gospel is that while we can (and do) sin our way into God’s mercy, we can’t sin our way out of his mercy.

“Maggot, worm!” So far from being a putdown, an ego-crusher, it’s the most positive thing that can be said of humankind. It’s positive in the first place because it’s the truth about us, and no falsehood, however sweet-sounding, is ultimately helpful or positive. It’s positive in the second place in that such a pronouncement is riddled with hope: sinners can be salvaged and restored.

Years ago I came to see that the most positive thing to be said about human beings is that we are sinners. The alternatives are unrelievably negative. If instead we say that humankind’s root problem is that we are uninformed, we make ourselves the ready victims of the propagandists. If instead we say that we are socially maladjusted, we welcome the cruelty of social engineering. If instead we think our root problem to be our material deprivation, we embrace a statist economy, and statist economies, we have seen repeatedly in our century, are humanly horrific. It’s supremely positive to say we are sinners: there’s hope for us.

To be sure, it’s the creature crowned with glory and honour that is also the sinner whom the Hebrew writer pronounces “Maggot, worm!” Yet it’s we maggots who are destined to have our inalienable glory and honour displayed in full splendour.

IV: — Then what are we finally? Are we a combination of the three descriptions we have heard today? If so, are we all three equally? Does one predominate? Which one?

Our questions are answered as we leave off guessing about ourselves and look to Jesus Christ. In him we are created for fellowship with the One who has crowned us with glory and honour. In him we are created for fellowship with the One in whom our dignity and worth are guaranteed forever. In him we are created for fellowship with the One before whom any Christ-like deed is rendered eternally significant. In him we are created for fellowship with the One in whom our sin is pardoned even as a new heart begins to throb within us. We are created for a fellowship in which our glorious humanity is restored, even made resplendent.

Some people have affirmed this and are stepping forward in it. Others have not yet affirmed it, but rather scorn it and thrust it away. Yet the invitation and summons remain. And therefore you and I are to look upon every human creature as invited to this fellowship and appointed to be a beneficiary of it. What the future of humankind is, at least in the western world, according to Solzhenitsyn, depends on whether the Christian Church can reassert convincingly the truth of God concerning his creation.

Theology matters.

                                                                    Victor Shepherd
March 1998            

Psalm 13

When I was a youngster I began reading the psalms simply because I had been told it would do me good to read them. I had been told that the psalms were the prayerbook of the bible, it was important that I learn to pray rightly, praying rightly would do much to render me godly, and therefore any one who aspired to godliness would steep himself in the psalms. I believed then that what I had been told was true. I believe it now. I read the psalms every day.

When I first read the psalms, however, I was disturbed: the psalmist spoke of his enemies so very often that I wondered if the fellow weren’t paranoid. What’s more, he called down God’s wrath on his enemies so often that I wondered if he weren’t vindictive. I didn’t think I was going to be rendered godly by taking to heart someone who seemed both paranoid and vindictive, and so I left off reading the psalms. I returned to them only when I was acquainted with two facts which I must impress upon you this morning. One, everywhere in the Hebrew bible where God’s judgement is invoked upon our enemies it is recognized that our enemies are ours only because they are first God’s enemies. In other words, our true enemies are not those who irk us or dislike us; the true enemies of God’s people are the enemies of God himself. They are first of all enemies of God’s truth, God’s purpose, God’s way, God’s faithfulness, patience and steadfast love. Two, everywhere in the Hebrew bible where God’s judgement is invoked upon enemies, what underlies the invocation isn’t mean-spirited vindictiveness, but rather a plea for God to vindicate his own name; a plea for God to act so as to clear his own name of the slander which God’s enemies have heaped upon it.

As soon as I had these two facts straight the psalms (and indeed the older testament as a whole) came alive for me as never before. I read it with renewed enthusiasm and relish and profit. I continue to aspire to godliness. If you are authentic in your Christian profession then you aspire to it too. Then it behooves all of us to return to the psalms again and again that they might be imprinted upon us indelibly. Today we are going to look at psalm 13.

I: — “How long, O Lord?”, the psalmist asks four times over in two verses. “How long do I have to wait? How long before you act? How long must pain and sorrow torment me?” What is the psalmist’s problem, anyway? Why is he so upset? “How long shall my enemies be exalted over me?” His problem is that his enemies, arrogant, puffed-up swaggerers, are gloating over him. They are snickering at him, bragging of the humiliation they have forced upon him, smirking at the anguish they have thrust upon him. Not only have they made him suffer, they have enjoyed making him suffer, and they are proud of it.

Remember, however, that the psalmist’s enemies are his enemies only because they are first God’s enemies. The psalmist is most upset not because he has been visited with contempt, but because God has. The psalmist’s upset merely reflects the distress which afflicts the heart of God.

Nonetheless, the psalmist himself is in pain; his enemies, while certainly God’s first, are still the psalmist’s. In fact, so upset is he that he cries, “How long?”, three more times. “How long am I to be stuck with this ache in my gut? How long will you, O Lord, hide your face from me? How long are you going to forget me?”

One reason I love the psalms is that I know the predicament of every Christian to be reflected in them. To be a Christian is to be surrounded with the enemies of our Lord himself. To be a Christian is to be immersed in conflict.

One of the saccharine myths which the church, ignorant of scripture, has foisted on Jesus, is the myth that wherever he went people became agreeable. I regularly receive denominational literature which tells me (incorrectly) that because Jesus is the reconciler, his word and deed invariably reconcile people. No! Jesus is the reconciler, and therefore his word and deed reconcile repentant sinners to God. Our Lord does not reconcile the unrepentant; his word and deed harden the unrepentant, harden them in their enmity to God. Our Lord does not, he cannot, reconcile sin and righteousness, depravity and godliness, the evil one and the Holy One of Israel. These are not reconciled; they can’t be.

Before our Lord reconciles anyone to God he is the agitator who overturns everything. He is born in Bethlehem, a nondescript suburb of Jerusalem, and King Herod slays every male infant he can find. He begins his public ministry by submitting to baptism at the hands of his cousin John, and John is executed. (This fact alone should make Joan Adams and me nervous about baptizing anyone!) He preaches in Capernaum and the people want to throw him over a cliff. He travels to Jerusalem and the ecclesiastical bureaucracy plots his demise. Finally he is betrayed by someone belonging to the most intimate circle of his followers. All of this I read in scripture. Yet the most recent document our denomination has published on scripture maintains that everywhere Jesus goes everyone becomes agreeable. In John’s gospel, several times over, after Jesus has spoken or acted, we are told, “The people were divided”. Before Jesus reconciles he fosters division, for he must first expose the enemies of God. Someone with no previous scriptural familiarity would see this upon first reading. The why can’t the church? Because a saccharine myth has obscured the truth of God.

The psalmist knows that to come to a knowledge of the truth and to be added to the people of God is to find God’s enemies our enemies. In short, to love God is to be immersed in conflict.

Several weeks ago I was asked to speak to a grade 7/8 class in an elementary school of the Toronto Board of Education. In the classroom there was a large poster (3 feet by 2 feet) immediately beside the blackboard. When students looked at the blackboard they couldn’t help seeing the poster. The poster had to do with health matters. In huge letters it urged students, “B.Y.O.C.” — and underneath the translation, “Bring Your Own Condom”. Let us make no mistake. In any communication there is, of course, the explicit message; in addition there are scores of implicit messages. Explicitly the poster merely said, “Bring Your Own Condom”. Implicitly, however, the poster poured out scores of messages concerning sexual activity, and its relation (non-relation) to human intimacy. (It is quite plain that those who approved the poster for the grade 7 classroom see no connection at all between sexual activity and human intimacy.) Another of the many implicit messages is that promiscuity is just fine; it’s only disease that’s bad. The scores of implicit messages which the poster sends out; every last one of them contradicts what Christians believe about human intimacy and the manner in which sexual activity subserves it. The gospel informs us that marriage, the fusion of husband and wife, is like a tree graft: each component of the graft grows into the other so as to form a union which is finally indescribable. Moreover, as this union develops and matures and bears fruit, the intensified union itself is the fruit which results from the tree-graft. All of this is denied by the implicit messages emanating from the poster.

I asked the teacher if the classroom where I was to speak were the regular classroom of the grade 7s and 8s or merely a classroom where my address was to be heard. She told me it was the regular classroom of the 7s and 8s. In the same instant I realized how bizarre my question was, for if it weren’t the regular classroom of the 7s and 8s it would have to be the regular classroom of a lower grade!

Now the teacher or parent who objects to the poster is going to be plunged into conflict instantly. Not to object, however, is to submerge one’s convictions. To object, on the other hand, will bring down the accusation of prudery, narrowness, naiveness, even the accusation of being quarrelsome and prickly. Nonsense. To object does not mean that we are argumentative or quarrelsome; it doesn’t mean that we are ornery and obnoxious and hard-to-get-along-with. To object, from a Christian perspective, means that we will not deny our Lord; we will not say of our only Saviour and hope, “I don’t know him now and never have”. To object, from a social perspective, means that we will not allow or encourage a tail to wag the dog. To object, from an educational perspective, means that we have identified some aspects of the offerings of the Toronto Board of Education to be delusive and dangerous. But let me say something important once more: to object would not mean that we were petty, petulant, or prickly. It would not mean that we were going out of our way stir up trouble. But it would most certainly plunge us into conflict.

Think of PATHWAY COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENTS, our affordable housing organization. (Marion Hartley, Gordon Hird and I are officers of it.) Last year, when we applied for a building permit (having already complied with all municipal regulations), we were besieged by neighbours who went on the warpath in an attempt at having us denied a building permit. Several of us went to an ugly meeting at Mississauga City Hall which lasted six hours. At that meeting the people whom we were trying to house, people who have the misfortune of not earning as much money as the neighbours on the warpath; these people were visited with slander and contempt. The median household income in our building (and of course a household can have — frequently does have — more than one wage-earner); the median household income is $21654 per year. As if it weren’t struggle enough to raise a family on $21600 per year, the strugglers have to be visited with slander and contempt. And so we met for six hours of nasty conflict. Should we have avoided the conflict? Ask the 35-year old blind student from Erindale College who, together with his seeing-eye dog, lives in Forest Ridge now, no longer having to sit on the bus for fours per day as he had to before. Should we have avoided the conflict? Ask the women who were originally among the nasty neighbours decrying the project and who found themselves desperate for housing eight months later when their husbands left them (and their children) for Miss Twitchy-Bottom at the office. While you are at it you should ask God himself, for in the person of his Son he has known what it is to be without accommodation. Not to have objected would not have meant that we are possessed of the virtue of agreeableness; it would have meant that we are polluted with the sin of cowardice.

I am president of The Peel Mental Health Housing Coalition and chairman of its board of directors. This organization attempts to procure housing for people who are chronically mentally ill. The Peel District Health Council has commissioned the Mental Health Housing Coalition to oversee the delivery of adequate housing for all mentally ill persons in the region of Peel. One aspect of the Housing Coalition’s mandate is dealing with community resistance. In view of the resistance which appeared last year concerning housing for the disadvantaged, can you imagine the resistance which will boil up concerning housing for the deranged? It is inconceivable that I “duck” it, for to avoid the conflict would only be to betray defenceless people, defenceless people whom God does not betray.

Most United Church people have been told from age three that Jesus is nice, and therefore all good Christian people should be nice too. When the theological betrayals first came upon our denomination a few years ago (theological betrayals, we should note, with consequences far beyond theology) our people quickly saw that to stand up for what they knew in their head and heart to be right would entail conflict. But Christians, they thought mistakenly, are conciliators, not contenders. And so across the country they largely capitulated, and one more tail — an unrighteous tail — was allowed to wag the dog. The terrible mistake by which they were victimized, the critical hinge on which everything turns in this pseudo-Christian view, is just this: Jesus isn’t nice. Our Lord is many things, but he is not nice!

The psalmist is not surrounded by enemies because he himself has gone out of his way to antagonize people, nor because he has a prickly, belligerent personality. He is surrounded by enemies inasmuch as God has drawn him into God’s own way and wisdom and truth, and once drawn into God’s life, he finds that God has enemies without number who are now his enemies too. The psalmist has learned that to remain faithful to the Holy One who cannot be deflected from his own righteousness is to be plunged into ceaseless conflict.

It’s easy to understand this with our head. But understanding it with our head makes it no easier for our heart to endure. For God’s enemies, now become ours, gloat; they taunt, they strut, they ridicule, they misrepresent, they disdain, they lie. Before long we are crying with the psalmist, “How long is this going to last? How long am I going to be in pain? How long are you going to hide your face from me? It seems that you have forgotten me!” What happens next?

II: — We do what the psalmist did. He prayed. I don’t mean that he folded his hands and said prettily, “Dear saccharine One, help me to be saccharine too!”. When I say he prayed I mean he shouted at God, “Consider me! Answer me! Aid me! But don’t leave me stumbling around punch-drunk! Don’t leave me in the dark so that my enemies taunt me all the more, ‘Not only is he a fool, he is a God-forsaken fool!'”

“Consider me! Answer me! Do something!” These are not dainty requests; these are imperatives. But isn’t it more than a little inappropriate, even more than a little dangerous, to be addressing God this way? No! Everywhere in scripture to pray is to wrestle with God, strive with God. Jacob wrestling through the night; so intense is his struggle, so concrete, so real, that he thinks he is wrestling with another human being. In the morning, exhausted, he learns he has been struggling with God. So intense was his struggle that he will hobble the rest of his life; as a sign of this, his name will be changed for the rest of his life, from Jacob (“deceiver”) to Israel (“he who struggles with God”). Hannah pleading with God so ardently, so intently, so unselfconsciously, that she is unaware of anything else, anyone else. She appears to be intoxicated. Eli, a priest, says to her, “Woman, you are drunk. Put the cork back in the bottle”. Hannah replies, “I am not drunk. I am a woman sorely troubled. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord”.

Our Israelite foreparents no more thought prayer should be pretty than they thought Jesus to be nice. Think of our Lord in Gethsemane. The English text tells us that Jesus “knelt” in the garden. Ever after we have seen pictures of Jesus kneeling beside a flat-topped rock, hands folded serenely. The Greek text, however, uses a verb-tense that tells us Jesus fell to his knees, got up, fell down again, over and over, like someone beside himself. Paul tells the Christians in Ephesus that when he prays for them he says, “I bow my knees”. He doesn’t mean that he kneels down to pray (Jews always stand up to pray); he means that his knees give out, so intense is his intercession.

One of the words the New Testament uses to describe prayer is AGONIZESTHAI. (Obviously the English word, “agonize”, is a derivative.) AGONIZESTHAI means to contend with the utmost exertion, to strive without letup, to wrestle without reserve. This is what it is to pray.

And this is what we do when conflict abounds and enemies gloat. We cry to God, “Consider me! Answer me! Aid me! But don’t fall asleep on me or I will sleep the sleep of death while my enemies rejoice over me. For then they will think they have triumphed over you!”

III: — There remains one matter to be probed: how do people find it in them to cry to God like this? How do people find it in them to contend with enemies and keep on contending? The psalmist tells us: “I have trusted in God’s steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in God’s salvation. I will sing to him, for he has dealt bountifully with me”.

All of this the psalmist puts at the end of psalm 13 by way of explaining how he can contend with enemies and cry to God day after day. While he puts it at the end of psalm 13, logically it comes at the beginning. It comes first inasmuch as it is the ground of everything the psalmist does.

I want to tell you today that God has dealt bountifully with me. After all, I am a sinner who merits nothing from God, nothing, that is, apart from condemnation. Yet in his Son God has made provision for me and by his Spirit he has made that provision mine. If this afternoon the most hideous thing befalls me it will still be the case that God has dealt bountifully with me. Of his incomprehensible mercy he has quickened in me that faith by which I am bound to him eternally. Then how could I ever say, regardless of what befalls me, that he has dealt miserably with me? How could I ever say that I have been shortchanged? People are shortchanged — anywhere in life — when they don’t get what they feel they are entitled to. But such is God’s steadfast love for me that he has poured out on me everything I don’t deserve (that salvation in which I rejoice) while sparing me everything that I do. Then how could I ever capitulate in those conflicts which are his first? Since he has dealt so bountifully with me as to save me, I owe him everything. Owing him everything, I owe him that faithfulness which but dimly reflects his faithfulness to me.

As surely as God has dealt bountifully with us he will continue to deal bountifully with us. Therefore we shall continue to trust in his steadfast love and rejoice in his salvation. Which is to say, we know that as often as our enemies harass us and we are driven to cry to God, he will hear us when we shout, “How long?” More than this, God will hasten the day when, in the words of psalm 110, God makes his enemies his footstool. On that day his enemies will vanish for ever, and therefore ours as well. Having trusted in his steadfast love, and rejoicing in his salvation, we shall glorify him for ever and ever.

The apostle James tells us that to remain faithful in the midst of conflict is to be honoured with that crown which God has promised to all who love him.

                                                                        Victor A. Shepherd

June, 1992

PSALM 15

An Exposition

The psalms were recited in private devotion in Israelite homes, in public worship in the sanctuary, and on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In any of these contexts they were part of a liturgy where the worshipper(s) asked a question and the priest (or head of the household), speaking for God, declared the answer.

E.g., Worshipper: “O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tent?”

Priest: “He who walks blamelessly.”

Verse 1 — TENT: — brings two matters to mind

formal worship (emphasised by “thy holy hill”)

The tent was the goatskin “tabernacle” that housed such items of worship as the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments while Israel travelled through the wilderness. The Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) structured the obedience of the Israelite people especially in adverse or awkward circumstances like the wilderness or, centuries later, the exile. (Finding ourselves in any of the many “wildernesses” that settle upon us is never an excuse for our disobedience, even though we like to tell ourselves that it is.)

According to Exodus 29:42 worshippers gathered in the “tent of meeting” where a year-old lamb was offered up morning and evening.

The psalm begins by asking who of the motley crowd of former slaves will be allowed in the tent of worship, the tent being the visible symbol of God’s presence.

simple family life (emphasised by “dwell”)

The psalms frequently mingle these two ideas, as here the psalmist speaks of the believer as an eager family member “coming home”. (e.g., Ps. 23:6 — “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”)

At the same time, since God is holy and we are defiled, we may not presume upon “coming home.” Since “evil may not dwell with Thee” (Ps. 5:4), the question, “Who shall sojourn?”, is entirely appropriate. Not anyone at all may dwell with God, but rather those whom the psalmist describes in the balances of psalm 15.

Once more the psalmist asks the same question: Who will be “at home” on God’s “holy hill”?

“Holy hill” = “Mount Zion” = “City of David”: — an area of old Jerusalem that David proclaimed as the site of worship. (Note how already, in two lines only, the psalm gathers up motifs from Israel’s wilderness wanderings prior to David’s reign and from the fixity of that reign: the “holy hill” was as fixed as the “tent” was mobile. God’s people are both forever “on the move” and forever “at home” with him. Life under him is always a venture; we can’t “hunker down” and “turtle” ourselves. At the same time we need seek no other home. God accompanies us in and even leads us into assorted wildernesses in life even as he “establishes” us so that we “dwell” with him. In this context we should recall our Lord’s use of “dwell”, as in John 15:4, where we “abide” in him and he in us. Menein, the common Greek word for “dwell” or “abide”, literally means to stay in one place. We are “fixed” in Christ even as he forever sends out and accompanies us on the “way.”

A DESCRIPTION OF GOD’S PEOPLE

Verse 2 — OUR CHARACTER: SOUND

We are to “walk blamelessly.”

“Walk” is the commonest biblical metaphor for discipleship, obedience.

We are to walk “blamelessly (Hebrew: tamin) not faultlessly or flawlessly. There is no injunction here to become perfectionistic neurotics. In this regard we should recall Christ’s command in Matthew 5:48, where his people are enjoined to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. The context is the following: Just as God sends rain on the just and unjust alike, without discrimination and regardless of merit, in the same way Christ’s people are to be generous with others, without discrimination and regardless of merit. In other words to walk “blamelessly” is to aspire after consistency. (The shape of the believer’s life is what “sanctification” denotes, and John Calvin (who engendered the Protestant Reformation outside German-speaking lands) reminds us that “Sanctification consists more in aspiration than in achievement.”)

There are three meanings to tamin:

sound: i.e., not hollow or merely apparent or phoney or unreliable. God’s claim upon us, together with our response, renders us people of substance.

whole: we grasp God’s claim in its totality, its comprehensiveness, as it pertains to every aspect of our existence.

wholehearted: we are enthused about our discipleship. In the words of Jesus, having put our hand to the plough we don’t look back, don’t even want to look back. Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that they are not merely to be givers, but cheerful givers.

We are to do what is “right”.

“Right” pertains to “righteous(ness)”, a two-fold meaning in scripture:

right(ed) relationship to God, born of faith

right conduct arising from this righted relationship, born of obedience.

Scripture nowhere suggests we are to pursue or have the right to pursue happiness or self-fulfilment. These are by-products of the one right and duty we have: to glorify God. “None but the holy are finally happy.” (the tireless reiteration of John Wesley — who found it in the Puritans)

Verse 2b-3 — OUR SPEECH: RESTRAINED

The Hebrew word for “slander” has the force of deliberately sniffing and snooping to ferret out what will then be spread around.

See Leviticus 19:16: — “You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people”

1 Timothy 5:13: — younger widows should remarry and forestall “coffee-klatsch” gossiping.

While modernity undervalues sins of the tongue, it should be remembered that the Decalogue views slander as seriously as it views murder and adultery. James 3 reminds us that the tongue is set on fire from hell and in turn sets on fire “the whole cycle of nature.” Jesus insists that on the day of judgement we shall be judged for every careless word that we’ve spoken. Matt. 12:37)

See Ephesians 4:29: speech is to “fit the occasion” and “impart grace to those who hear.”

Colossians 4:6: speech is to be “gracious” and “seasoned with salt.” (Everywhere in scripture salt is a sign of the covenant. In other words, our speech is to attest the promises whereby God has pledged himself to us and we have pledged ourselves to him.

We are to “speak truth from the heart”; i.e., speak so as to be transparent, edifying and appropriate. To “take up a reproach” is (i) to muckrake, (ii) to make casual slurs that aren’t slanderous, strictly speaking, since they aren’t untrue, but are unnecessary and deleterious.

Verse 4 — OUR ALLEGIANCE: UNMISTAKABLE

“in whose eyes a reprobate (=sinner) is despised.” God’s people must loathe sin. Then why doesn’t the psalmist say, “in whose eyes sin is despised”? — because sin as such doesn’t exist: sin has no existence apart from sinners. Only sinners can be “despised”. While we commonly say that Christians are to hate sin but love sinners, our saying this is illogical: we can’t “hate sin”; we can only hate sinners. God hates sinners and loves them at the same time. However, his love transcends his hate; “mercy triumphs over judgement.” (James 2:13) His love outstrips his hate.

When the psalmist writes “in whose eyes a reprobate is despised” he’s not suggesting that we fancy ourselves self-righteously superior, but rather that our loyalty is evident: we don’t secretly admire or covet what is despicable.

“who honours those who fear the Lord.” One sign of our faith is that we esteem others who fear God. “Fear of God” includes trust, love, obedience, awe, and plain, simple fear. “Fear of God” sums up the whole of biblical faith. (Martin Buber) When the women beheld the empty tomb on Easter morning, they were possessed of “fear and great joy.” When the disciples found themselves amidst the storm now stilled, they were “filled with awe”, says the RSV English text; the Greek text says more simply, “They feared a great fear.” In scripture we either fear God and nothing else, or we don’t fear God and therefore fear everything else. See Isaiah 8:12-13: “Do not fear what they fear [i.e., others]; But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy, and him you shall fear.” The believer’s fear of God grounds the command, “You shall not be afraid of the face of man.” (Deut. 1:7)

Verse 4C-5 — OUR DEALINGS: HONOURABLE

[1] we “swear to our own hurt”; i.e., we keep our word even if it costs us to keep it. (Paul — “Am I like a worldly man, ready to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at once?” 2Cor. 1:17) We swear to our own hurt, rather than to another’s, unlike Herod concerning John the Baptist, when Herod swore to give his daughter anything she asked for and she, prompted by her mother (angry at John’s denunciation of her sin) urged the daughter to ask for John’s head.

[2] We don’t “put out our money at interest.” Scripture doesn’t forbid “renting out” one’s money. (See Christ’s parable of the talents, Matt. 25, where he faults the man who stuck his money in the ground instead of “putting it out at interest.”) Scripture recognises that the lender has a right to share in the profit that the borrower makes with the lender’s money. At the time of the Reformation it was recognised that interest is rent paid on money, and everyone admits the legitimacy of renting others’ goods.

However, scripture forbids charging interest on money borrowed for life’s necessities. We are never to exploit financially someone else’s destitution.

[3] We don’t “take a bribe against the innocent.” We can’t be paid off to subvert justice.

 Verse 5c — OUR PLACE: ASSURED

We shall “never be moved.” In the psalms the profoundest threat of insecurity is often expressed by “moved.” To be “moveable” is to be vulnerable, defenceless, finally insecure. We counter the threat of insecurity not by siding with the strong but by steadfastly trusting God. (“Because the Lord is at my right hand I shall not be moved.” Ps. 16:8)

The force of the last line of Psalm 15 is, “such a person shall not be ‘moved’, ever.” Instead we shall be preserved eternally by God, for God, with God.

Victor Shepherd
October, 1999

Psalm 16

The English poet Charles Swinburne insisted that the icy breath of Jesus has put a chill on the world. He insisted that Christ “puts a damper” on life; that our Lord is like a soggy, foul-smelling blanket that deprives people of brightness, joy, laughter; deprives people not only of effervescent mood but even of the pleasures of the senses. Wherever Jesus Christ is spoken of, mildew is about to blight the human spirit.

Swinburne isn’t the only person to have thought this. We’ve all heard our Lord’s name hissed derisively as someone, thinking herself sophisticated, sneered at “that creeping Jesus.” Apparently there is thought to be something creepy about him: oily, cold, grey, a killjoy both uninvited and uninviting, better left alone. And of course anyone who deems Jesus to be this deems us, his followers, to be no better.

Think about the similar associations surrounding the word “Puritan.” “Puritan” is a great word in the English vocabulary, as far as I’m concerned, just because the Puritans made a great contribution to the public good everywhere in the English-speaking world. The Puritans, more than any other group, were responsible for expanding if not providing virtually all the democratic institutions we enjoy, as well as for preserving the intellectual riches we cherish. Always remember that when the Royal Academy of Science was formed in the 17^th century, nearly all its charter members — leading scientists of the day — were Puritan clergy. And always remember that when the Puritans were ascendant in Britain and in North America their rate of literacy was vastly higher than that of their detractors (especially among Puritan women). And never forget that when the Jewish people had been expelled from Britain in the 13^th century it was the Puritans who welcomed then back and allowed them synagogue, school and cemetery. The Puritans were sober and serious, of course, yet also life-embracing, sport-loving, and sex-affirming. Still, for reasons I can’t fathom, the word “Puritan” is said to call to mind someone who fears that somebody, somewhere, might be having fun.

It appears that many people are held off the Christian life by their suspicion that intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ entails joylessness. For years C.S. Lewis thought this. A brilliant scholar trained in philosophy and English literature, Lewis feared that immersion in God would corrode the intellectual and cultural glories he had come to relish.

I’m convinced that many people fear the same fear. While their life might not be exactly rollicking at this moment, in fact while it may be much less joyful than they’d like, they fear that to become serious about the gospel and him whose gospel it is would evaporate whatever joy, however little, they have right now.

How different is the psalmist’s conviction born of his experience: “In God’s presence there is fullness of joy; in God’s right hand are pleasures for evermore.” Before we go any farther we must be sure to understand the Hebrew idiom. God’s presence, for the Hebrew mind, is God’s face. “In God’s presence” means “as we behold God’s face inasmuch as we’ve turned to face him and glow ourselves as his smile bathes us. “Fullness of joy” is a Hebrew way of saying “wholly satisfying.” God’s presence, God’s face, leaves us so thoroughly satisfied as to find us looking nowhere else for a supplement. “In God’s right hand” (note “in”, not “at”; “in” God’s right hand); God’s right hand is very different from his left hand. God’s left hand is the hand of judgement; his right hand, the hand with which he dispenses blessing, riches, delights, priceless treasure, even incomprehensible ecstasy. And who is the person who finds God’s face wholly satisfying and his right hand quick to release blessing of endless variety upon us? The psalmist tells us it’s the person who cries to God, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you”, the person who exults, “I keep the Lord always before me.” (Ps. 16:2,8) In God’s presence there are pleasures that can’t be counted, can’t be duplicated, can’t be found anywhere else in anyone else.

Does it strike you as exaggerated and therefore unrealistic? I think it’s entirely realistic just because it deals with the ultimately real, God.

I: — Let’s begin with the simple joy of life in God. In his most famous parable, that of the lost son, Jesus describes a fellow who sashays into an unsatisfying, unfruitful existence, humiliating even and degrading, because in his ingratitude and folly he can’t stand his father and can’t stand living with him. Thinking life will be more joyful without his father, he leaves him, only to discover that there was vastly more joy in his father’s home and his father’s presence. He “comes to his senses”, goes home, and is welcomed without hesitation, reservation or qualification. The last line in the story is, “And they began to make merry.”

Jesus speaks of a shepherd who finds one lost sheep (never mind that he already had ninety-nine), and goes home rejoicing. Concerning anyone who makes life’s biggest “U-turn” (the bible calls it repentance) and tastes the delights of living in the father’s house, Jesus says, “There is joy in heaven.” Yes, there is joy in heaven. And in the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry there was also joy on earth. Over and over throughout the written gospels we find Jesus partying. He’s forever eating and drinking in celebration of the lost found, the alienated reconciled, the guilty pardoned, the least elevated to honour, the lonely cherished and embraced. So what if he’s faulted for it. The only people who fault him for it are those who are blind to the Kingdom and therefore can’t see the point of the party. Those who can, however, party with the Master as often as they have opportunity.

Augustine wrote, “We are made for God. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.” Since we are made for him then of course it’s only in him that we shall be profoundly contented and shall know a joy, a delight, available nowhere else. In his presence we are going to be satisfied, and in his right hand we are going to find blessings without number.

Our society, however, can’t see it. Our society has no difficulty recognizing the distress of a fish out of water. The fish gasps, twitches, convulses. As soon as it’s put back into the water it swims away without hint of distress. Our society gets the point where fish are concerned, but doesn’t get the point where humans are concerned; namely, God’s presence, his “face”, is the sphere, the environment for which we were made and apart from which we are always going to be distressed.

Ever since Canadian Confederation (1867) each generation of Canadians has been twice as wealthy (on average) as the preceding generation. I am twice as wealthy as my parents, four times as wealthy as my grandparents, and so on. In other words, people today have unprecedented disposable income. What do they spend it on? They spend it on pleasures, all manner of pleasures, hoping that one of the assorted pleasures they try will issue in that joy too deep to be described that everyone craves, or hoping that all their assorted pleasures together will yield this. But they fail to understand something crucial: to pursue pleasure is always to be deprived of it. To look for it is always to overlook it. To set out to get it is to think that joy is “gettable”, something, some thing that can be acquired, when all the while joy is to be found in God alone and isn’t detachable from him. Joy characterizes God’s own inner life: he profoundly delights in himself. As we are admitted, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, to the inner life of God we are admitted to the joy wherewith he rejoices internally, eternally. Joy, then, is found in intimacy with a person; it is never “gotten” as if it were a thing detachable from a person.

Since it is only as we hunger for the person of God that we find his joy overtaking us, the profoundest joy that we crave always comes upon us as surprise. C.S. Lewis, mentioned earlier in the sermon, was an able philosophical thinker. In fact it was his rigorous philosophical thought that moved him from strident atheism to the threshold of intellectually robust faith. Yet when Lewis came to write his autobiography its title wasn’t “How Philosophy Helped Men Believe” but rather “Surprised by Joy.”

II: — Once we come to know that God himself is the wellspring of joy we find ourselves free to rejoice in the joys of God’s creation. Once again, however, we must understand that God wants us to enjoy his creation without confusing it with him, its Creator. We are to rejoice in creaturely joys without making them a substitute for God himself and his joy. The psalmist, in Psalm 16, understands this when he writes, “Those who choose another god, another deity, multiply their sorrows.” It is only as we “choose” him who truly is God that we are then free to enjoy most profoundly the blessings of his good creation.

[1] Think about marriage. God intends marriage to be a union so intimate that the hearts of two people interpenetrate each other in such a way that one person’s life henceforth includes the other person. Marriage, in other words, God intends to be the most intimate and the most profound of human relationships. (And it’s for this reason, by the way, that marriage everywhere in scripture is the commonest metaphor for our life in God.)

But of course God’s intention for marriage is to be realized in God; his intention is honoured most profoundly when we understand that marriage is a triangle: not the illicit triangle of the soap opera, but a triangle whose apex is God and whose base is husband and wife. Husband and wife move toward each other as both of them are oriented to the apex. Husband and wife see each other most truly not by staring at each other but rather by looking to their Lord and seeing their mate in him.

Where this doesn’t occur husband and wife see each other by staring at each other. Now they live in a universe of two people, and they quickly learn it’s a small universe. They have effectively made an idol of each other (they have “chosen another deity”, in the words of Psalm 16), and they will shortly learn that all idols have clay feet. They expect now that their marriage-partner is going to provide what no human being should be asked to provide. No one human being can provide that satisfaction which God alone intends us to find in him. To expect one’s partner to do this is to burden the marriage intolerably.

A young husband says of his wife, “She is simply divine.” Two years later he sighs, “Well, I suppose she’s only human.” Later still, “I feel I can’t live without her yet I can’t seem to live with her.” Finally, “We have discovered that we are incompatible.”

His wife isn’t divine, never was, never will be. Certainly she is meant to satisfy him humanly in the most intimate human relationship ordained by God; but she was never meant to satisfy him with that joy which can only be a surprise just because it’s a by-product of our immersion in God himself.

To expect our marriage partner to do what only God can do is to choose another deity and therein multiply our sorrows. Yet in the right hand of God there are pleasures beyond telling just because in his presence, beneath his smile, there is a satisfaction that is finally both undeniable and indescribable.

[2] Think about recreation. God has created us with bodies. There is no human being who doesn’t have a body. Our body isn’t something we drag around grudgingly but rather something we should positively delight in. People who rediscover their bodily nature delight in it. Look at the proliferation of health clubs, squash courts, swimming pools and gymnasia.

I relish bodily existence as much as anyone. Because I was a boxer please don’t regard me as a troglodyte who enjoyed pain, either inflicting pain or having it inflicted. What I relished about boxing was the training: I never had to be cajoled into the gymnasium. Today no one has to browbeat me to get on my bicycle. I think I am as body-affirming as anyone.

At the same time, there is in our society a cult of the body, a deification of the body and particularly of body image. To make an idol of body image is to choose another deity and therein to multiply sorrow, if only the ever-increasing sorrow and frustration of watching one’s body shape change irretrievably with age.

And then there are those who attribute vast metaphysical significance to bodily activity. Yoga ceases to be exercise only and instead becomes the key that unlocks the universe or at least allows someone to intuit the innermost realities of the universe. Six months later she sadly concludes that while yoga fosters flexibility and reduces tension, it doesn’t satisfy humankind’s nameless longing, nameless discontent, nameless weariness.

A few months ago a Vancouver magazine asked me if it could reproduce my article on Martin Niemoeller, the Lutheran pastor who defied Hitler and was imprisoned from 1937 to 1945, and was released by American forces only three days before his scheduled execution at the hands of the S.S. I permitted the magazine to reproduce my article, with the result that I now receive the magazine. There is much in it that I support. There is much, however, that wants to coddle this aspect of our embodiedness and that aspect of it, all with a view to spiritual transformation. One source of such transformation is balneotherapy, balneotherapy being the human transformation that arises from bathing in salts, steam, seaweed, or infrared saunas. Another source of transformation arising from attention to the body is sound therapy, touch therapy, vitamin therapy, herbal consultation, electromagnetism, enemas. I am not saying that all of these ways of attending to the body are pointless. I am saying, however, that they reflect an obsession with the body that aims at furnishing the joy God intends us to find in our embodiedness but will never furnish just because they seek it from the wrong source.

Why don’t we look instead to our Maker, admit he has seen fit to create us embodied, thank him for the manner of our existence, and delight in it? This will find us enjoying many of the pleasures in his right hand whereas making an idol of the body (choosing another deity) will find us pursuing what always escapes us.

[3] Lastly let’s consider the delight we find in culture: art, music, poetry, drama, fiction. You are as fond of all this as I. The level of cultural appreciation is very high in this congregation, and for this I am glad, since God ordains us to receive everything from his hand with thanksgiving. There is nothing in his creation that we are to scorn.

Let me say unambiguously that I have profited immensely and continue to profit from my exposure to fiction, poetry, biography, music, fine art, the theatre, dance, history. I scorn none of it, as I’m sure you scorn none of it. But of course along with the riches of God’s creation that we’d never think of scorning, God insists that we not scorn him. And he ordains that we not scorn him just because he is God and is to be acknowledged for who he is; in addition he knows that while cultural riches are rich indeed, they will never give us what he alone can. If ever we think they can, then we lose twice over: we “lose” inasmuch as we have disregarded the One who is our life, our good, our ultimate blessing. We “lose” a second time in that our unrealistic expectations leave us expecting from culture what it can’t deliver, with the result that we forego what it can.

The fact that culture can’t substitute for him who is our Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer is brought home most forcefully to us when we feel that a wall has collapsed on us, when we inquire of the physician concerning a loved one and he merely shakes his head, when any of life’s endless abysses opens up at our feet and we can scarcely believe — but also cannot not believe — that it’s happening to us. At this moment we don’t play our favourite soprano trilling La Boheme or read our favourite novel. John Henry Cardinal Newman, himself a master of English prose, remarked, “There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about the consolation of literature.”

Heinrich Heine, the great German poet, had a sophisticated appreciation of sculpture. Following a tragedy in his family he took a trip, hoping to distract himself, and found himself before the beautiful form of the Venus de Milo. Gazing at it he cried, “It’s beautiful, but it has no arms.” At such times we must rather cling to the truth that has sustained God’s people for three millennia: “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (Deut. 33:27)

Because God is good he has given us all things richly to enjoy. “Everything created by God is good,” says the apostle Paul, “and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” (1^st Tim. 4:4) Yet our great God and Saviour forever remains the good, and it is to him that we must cling at all times and in all circumstances.

Charles Swinburne, the English poet was wrong. Jesus Christ isn’t a wet blanket who stifles life’s joys. On the contrary, to encounter our Lord is to know the God in whose presence there is fullness of joy and in whose right are pleasures for evermore. It’s no wonder Paul exults, “Because you are Christ’s, everything is yours as well.” (1^st Cor. 3:23)

                                                                                           Victor Shepherd   

June 2002

Psalm 29:9

“…and in God’s temple all cry ‘Glory!'” (Ps. 29:9)

I was only eight years old when Elizabeth II was crowned. My family didn’t own a television set, and so I was sent to a neighbour’s to watch the coronation. Some parts of the service (such as the archbishop’s droning) didn’t excite me. But there was one part that did: the appearance and stately movement of Elizabeth herself. While I didn’t have, as an eight year old, the vocabulary I have now to describe the event, I can none the less recall so very clearly the impression that Elizabeth made on me. She exuded substance; there was a gravity about her, a weightiness, a force, an authority — substance. Her appearance reflected all of this, for her appearance radiated splendour, magnificence, stateliness, honour. The authority and substance that she was herself; the splendour and honour that she radiated: these together elicited from her subjects obeisance, homage, respect, even awe. The event of Elizabeth’s coming forth as sovereign was simply glorious.

The sovereign God is eversomuch more glorious. The Hebrew word for glory is kabod. Kabod means literally “weightiness” or “substance.” There is in God a weightiness, a density, a solidity, an opacity — substance — as there is nowhere else. Because God is all this, his appearance, his splendour, is weighty too. His splendour is awesome; his appearance is startling. He surges over men and women and weighs on them until they are breathless even as his splendour startles them speechless. As speech begins to return to them they can only stammer at first, then blurt as they grope for words, then speak normally as they recover from their visitation of glory.

God’s glory is God’s presence apprehended. But God’s presence is the presence of him who is more solid than anything we can imagine. God’s presence is the presence of an ever-so-dense substance whose authority is unarguable. Such a presence apprehended has to leave us awed. We can only fall on our face and render him obeisance, homage, honour, the only response the glory-visited will ever render.

I: — Moses cries to God, “Show me your glory!”(Ex. 33:7-23) God replies, “I will make all my goodness pass before you; I will proclaim my name before you.” Actually the two assertions are but one, for God’s name is his nature, and God’s nature is his goodness. “I will make all my goodness pass before you”; “I will proclaim my name before you”: these are one and the same, spoken twice as promise and guarantee of the one glory of God soon to be apprehended. Moses has to go to a cleft in the rock and have the rock prop him up on both sides. For in the moment that God’s glory passes by, Moses’s knees will flop like a rag doll’s; he’ll stagger like a man terribly drunk; he’ll fold up like a boxer who has taken a terrific punch to the solar plexus. Moses goes to the cleft of the rock, supported on either side as the glory of God surges over him. Is it an experience just for the sake of an experience? Is it pointless sensationalism? Is it merely the equivalent of a hallucinogenic trip? Never. In the wake of God’s glory, his presence apprehended, God renews his promise to an ungrateful and wayward Israel; God renders Moses his spokesperson; through Moses God insists that Israel is to make no compromise with paganism; any suggestion of idolatry should find the people horrified; every vestige of adoration given anywhere but to him is to be shunned. For God’s glory, unmistakable, is also undeniable.

Five hundred years later the people of Israel, having ignored Moses as much as they heeded him, are in exile. Jerusalem, their prized city, is in ruins. Having failed to repudiate idolatry in any form at any time, they are now stuck in Babylon, living among people who are nothing but idolatrous all the time. (Let me assure you, parenthetically, of a truth that courses through scripture: God unfailingly punishes sin by means of more sin. The worst consequence of sin is always more sin — by God’s ordination.) The people are crushed on account of their undeniable guilt, and despairing on account of their unrelieved bleakness. Then God’s glory overtakes Ezekiel. Ezekiel falls on his face. God says to him, “Stand up, and I will speak with you.”(Ez. 1:28) Says God, “I am sending you to an impudent and stubborn people. Still, you must speak to them the word that I give you. And whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that there has been a prophet among them.”(Ez. 2:4) Ezekiel speaks the word he’s been given. It cuts like a knife. Like a knife? Like a scalpel, for this word performs surgery, a heart transplant, to be exact. Those who hear and heed the prophet’s word will have their old heart of stone — hard, lifeless, inert — removed; they’ll be given a new heart of flesh, a heart that pulsates with the rhythm of God’s own heart.

Seven hundred years later still (1200 years after Moses) some shepherds are guarding sheep on a hillside when the glory of God prostrates them. Once again the unspeakable weight of God, apprehended in his splendour, has overwhelmed men who couldn’t find a rock-cleft to prop them up. They think themselves undone when they are told, “To you, sinners, a Saviour is born this day; a great joy for all people everywhere.” And in that moment it seemed that the heavens shouted, “Glory to God in the highest, and shalom among men on earth.”(Luke 2:11)

No doubt someone here today wants to complain that I’ve spoken only of episodic incursions of God’s glory visited among a handful of individuals in unusual circumstances. But where are we twentieth century types? After all, we are ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. So where are we in all this? We are precisely where the apostle John was when he exclaimed, “The Word of God became flesh and camped among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, the glory of Father and Son alike.”(John 1:14) We — you and I — have beheld his glory, or at least we should have!

II: — We who have beheld God’s glory in the lingering of Jesus Christ among us; who are we? We are creatures of God, to be sure; we are beloved of God, unquestionably. Still, as God’s glory engulfs us we are exposed as inglorious ourselves. God’s glory is substance; this substance exposes our unsubstantiality, our froth and frivolity, triflers and trivializers that we are. God’s glory is splendour; his splendour shows up our sordidness. God’s glory is weightiness; his denseness highlights our hollowness. God’s glory is his presence; his presence renders conspicuous our absence. Absence? Of course. Compared to the concreteness of God’s person, we are non-persons, nonentities who spout nonsense and stupidly think it to be profound.

Since God is holy and we are defiled; since God’s holiness cannot withstand even a hint of defilement, our reaction can only be that of Isaiah in the temple the day he “saw the Lord high and lifted up”, the day God’s splendour filled the temple. Isaiah could only cry, “Woe is me, for I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”(Is. 6:1-8)

Peter and his friends have fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus steals upon them and tells them to go deeper; they must forget about splashing about in the shallows and go deeper. Peter tells Jesus he thinks the whole exercise is pointless, but out of sheer obedience, rote obedience, he’ll do what he’s told. Upon seeing the huge catch of fish Peter falls to his knees and begs Jesus to leave, crying, “Go away, for I am a sinful man.”(Luke 5:8)

John is at worship, one Sunday morning, when the Lord he longs to apprehend (isn’t this why all of us are at worship this morning?) gloriously appears before him. When John has recovered and is able to write, albeit shakily, he scribbles, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead.”(Rev. 1:17)

We must notice that Isaiah, in his aweful moment, didn’t try to excuse himself or excuse his people or negotiate with God. Instead of “Don’t be touchy now, we can work something out together”, Isaiah croaked, “I’m finished.” And the result? He wasn’t finished; he was purified with the living coal from the altar; his sin was forgiven, and he was commissioned God’s messenger to his people.

We must notice that Peter, in his aweful moment, didn’t say to Jesus, “So I was wrong about how deep to fish; I’ve been wrong before; let’s not sweat it.” Instead he pleaded with Jesus to leave, lest Christ’s presence intensify his shame. And the result? Peter is told that he will henceforth “catch” men and women for the kingdom; he will become the spokesperson for the twelve; and he will be recognized as the leader of all Christ’s people in Jerusalem.

We must notice that John, in his aweful moment, didn’t say, “At last the church service started to liven up!” Instead he could only wait until his strength returned. And the result? He penned that book — Revelation — which rings with the victory of Jesus Christ on every page.

The point I am making in all this is surely obvious: when God’s glory surges over us, when his glory meets our sin, his glory always takes the form of grace. Grace is God’s love and mercy declaring guilty people pardoned. Grace is God’s love and mercy setting crumbled people back on their feet. Grace is God’s love and mercy restoring humiliated people to dignity. Grace is God’s love and mercy granting dead people life.

None of this should surprise us. After all, Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that it was God’s glory that raised Jesus from the dead and restored him to life.(Rom. 6:4) Then why not us? And in fact Paul reminds the Christians in Corinth that God’s glory is changing them day-by-day into the likeness of Christ himself.(2 Cor. 3:18) God’s grace is God’s glory meeting our sin. And God’s glory, having brought our Lord to life, is enlivening us day-by-day as we are vivified according to our Lord’s likeness.

III: — Since this is indubitably the case, there is only one response that graced people like us, glorified people like us, can make. Our one response is gratitude. Our gratitude will take many forms: public worship, private devotion, secret resolve in the face of secret temptation, open support for the openly exploited, anonymous assistance on behalf of the defenceless, angry denunciation of the indefensible. Whatever form our gratitude takes, it will always be the gratitude of our heart poured out upon our Lord for grace that saved us as God’s glory met our sin.

Other people don’t understand any of this? So what! Their incomprehension is their problem. They misunderstand everything we do and misjudge our motive for doing it? ‘Twas ever thus, as we see from the story of the woman who poured her perfume on the feet of Jesus, blubbered on them and wiped feet and tears with her hair.(Luke 7:36-52) The man in whose house Jesus was a guest assumed that because this woman had a reputation as negative as it was notorious, she was up to no good. Why, anyone could see the eroticism in her seductive act! Let that man with shriveled heart and constipated affection; let him assume whatever he wants. Jesus knew that the woman couldn’t find words for a gratitude so great that greater alone was the grace that had quickened it.

For years now I have been moved as often as I have read the Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563. The Heidelberg Catechism is the “crown jewel” of the shorter Reformation writings. I have referred to it in sermons so often that many of you can recite question and answer #1. Q#1: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” A#1: “My only comfort, in life and in death, is that I belong, body and soul, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.” (There’s more to A#1, but we’ve said enough for now.) What about Q&A#2? Q#2: “How many things do you need to know in order that you may live and die in this comfort and blessing?” A#2: “Three things I need to know. First, how great my sin and misery is. Second, how I am redeemed from all my sin and misery. Third, how I am to be grateful to God for such redemption.” Our apprehension of God’s glory acquainted us with our sin and misery. Our apprehension of God’s glory, now dwelling among us in Jesus Christ his Son, acquainted us with our redemption. Our apprehension of God’s glory, that which raised our Lord from the dead, is similarly at work in us changing us into his likeness; this has acquainted us with the fittingness of gratitude. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude; it’s all gratitude; the whole of the Christian life is gratitude. And in fact the Heidelberg Catechism gathers up the whole of the Christian life (Questions and Answers 86 through 129) under the heading, Gratitude. Question #86 begins the section on discipleship, and Answer #86 tells us that “with our whole life…we are to show ourselves thankful to God for his goodness.”

The people who inhaled the Heidelberg Catechism and exhaled it with every breath; they exhaled it as well with their last breath. It was written in 1563. A few years earlier the emperor, Charles V, had trampled on the Reformation and its people in eastern Germany. Those who lived in western Germany, Heidelberg, knew what was coming. Nine years later, in 1572, the St.Bartholomew’s Day massacre would explode, as 30,000 French citizens of gospel conviction were put to the sword (among them Admiral de Coligny, the highest-ranking officer in the French navy.) They died repeating to themselves, “My only comfort in life and in death…. And what do I need to know to die in this comfort and blessing? I need to know, finally, how I am to be grateful to God for my redemption. Gratitude means I shall die before I ever deny my Lord.”

What does gratitude mean for you and me today? It means eversomuch everywhere in life. In view of the special service today (Stewardship Sunday) we have to understand that it means something specific in one area of life; it means something specific with respect to our money. Our stewardship of our money has to express the truth that “with our whole life we…show ourselves thankful to God for his goodness to us.”

Can money express our whole life? How does money express something crucial about our whole life? We have to understand what God does characteristically. Characteristically God frees. From the day of Red Sea and Sinai to the day of cross and resurrection to the coming day of the kingdom’s public manifestation, God has been about one thing: freeing us. He frees us from every bondage that bespeaks our bondage to sin. Then how free are we? Our freedom with respect to money illustrates more than we think about how free we are (or aren’t) anywhere in life.

Think for a minute about the immense power money has. We all know that money talks, and we don’t hesitate to say that it talks. Money also makes people fall silent. If money both talks and silences then money is exceedingly powerful. And so it is, for we know that money bribes, money coerces, money renders the most loyal people treacherous, money renders the strongest-willed suggestible, money punishes, money perverts, money seduces. So powerful is money that there’s nothing money can’t do. Then does it have us in its might grasp? Are we Christians tyrannized by it too? We like to say we are free with respect to money, but nobody believes us. Nobody believes us for one reason: the only freedom there is with respect to money is the freedom to give it away. All other talk about freedom with respect to money is the rationalizing of the self-deluded, for the only freedom with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

God’s glory is God’s presence apprehended. To be acquainted with his glory is to have had his glory slay us and resurrect us, condemn us and pardon us, discard us and conscript us, kill us and comfort us. To be acquainted with his glory is to know that we are being changed into the likeness of Jesus Christ as we are freed day-by-day from bondages known and unknown. Freed? Are we really being freed? Everywhere in life? Even with respect to our money? How do we know? Who would ever believe us? The answer to the last six questions is declared by one truth: the only freedom we have with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

For a long time now I have known that we aren’t going to give it away until we are genuinely freed, and we aren’t going to be freed until we are constrained to cry with the psalmist, “And in God’s temple — in church, Sunday-by-Sunday in church — all cry, ‘Glory!”

                                                                         Victor Shepherd    

October 1997

Psalm 31:15        1^st Timothy 1:16         John 11:25

I enjoy few spectacles more than I enjoy a circus.    The last item in any circus happens to be my favourite; namely, the trapeze. Even if some of the items in the circus program are slightly “corny”, I can endure them because I know that the trapeze display will make everything worthwhile.

There are two kinds of trapeze performers, catchers and flyers.   The catcher hangs by his legs from a trapeze bar, and he swings back and forth on a trapeze swing that has a short arc.   The flyer (flyers are always smaller than catchers, and for this reason flyers are frequently women); she swings back and forth on trapeze swing with a huge arc. The moment in the trapeze display I look for is that breathless instant when the flyer has left her swing and hangs motionless in mid-air for a split second as the catcher meets her outstretched hands and swings her to the platform with him.

If the trapeze display is even more dramatic, the flyer leaves her swing and somersaults several times up into the air.   As she descends, still tumbling over and over, she reaches out her hands at the last instant and finds the hands of the catcher.  It thrills me.

I’m thrilled even if the catcher misses the flyer and the flyer falls. I’m thrilled but not horrified, since I know the flyer will fall into the net, bounce up onto her feet unharmed and wave to the crowd while the crowd applauds.

Much of life is like a trapeze event.  There are moments when we appear to be suspended in the middle of nowhere, hoping somehow to be caught.   There are situations too where we are tumbling, tumbling over and over, and can only hope that arms of some sort are going to be waiting for us.

But of course there’s also much about life that isn’t like a trapeze event. For one, life isn’t entertainment. For another, there’s no net underneath us.

Many people feel that life, day in and day out, is like that moment when the trapeze performer is suspended between what she’s left behind and what she’s hoping to find in front of her.  We often feel that life is a matter of being suspended between past and future. And since life isn’t entertainment but rather is for real, being suspended between past and future isn’t always pleasant, let alone exhilarating.  Sometimes it’s threatening.  We feel that the past is riddled with painful regrets, resentments, injuries, sins; and we fear that the future might hold more of the same. And the present? We feel that the present could precipitate us at any moment into a plunge we’d prefer not to think about.

The psalmist knows how we feel.  Yet as often as apprehension rises in him he moves beyond his apprehension to a knowledge yet more profound: he knows that his times – whether past, future, or present – his times are in God’s hand.   “My times are in your hand”, he writes.  For him, past and future and present are in God’s hand just because he, the psalmist, is in God’s hand.  Because God’s grip on him is stronger than his grip on God, he knows that his times are in God’s hand.

What about our times?

I: — Let’s look first at the past. We should understand that the past isn’t past; that is, the past isn’t merely past. The past, even the distant past, continues to reach forward into the present.  In other words, so far from dead, the past is alive.

[a] Think, for instance, of how past sins still haunt us.  (I know what you want to tell me right now: the text of our sermon reads “My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.” While we have many enemies and persecutors, I remain convinced that we are frequently our own worst enemy and frequently our own worst persecutor.)  Perhaps we carved someone up with our tongue or betrayed someone for personal advantage or allowed someone we could have defended to be humiliated. A relationship was destroyed or at least damaged.

Perhaps we committed what others might call an indiscretion but which we more honestly name for what it was, sin, and its consequences have lingered from that day to this.  What we sowed we are still reaping; the aftermath reaches forward to us now, and it haunts us.

Some people advise us, “Just forget about it all.”   But we don’t simply forget what every day finds us thinking about in undistracted moments. To the end of his life the apostle Paul never forgot, couldn’t forget, that he had been a persecutor. His persecution had been extreme enough to engineer the deaths of several Christians. Yet when he writes to Timothy, a much younger man beginning his ministry, Paul says tersely yet profoundly, “I received mercy.”   “I can’t pretend I didn’t do what I did, and I can’t pretend the consequences weren’t and aren’t what everyone knows them to be, but I received mercy.”

Paul knows that the facts of the past can’t be changed.  Yet he knows with equal certainty that much about the past can be changed. The effectual mercy that Jesus Christ wraps around his people prevents the past from crippling us. Mercy means that the self-accusation with which we torture ourselves concerning the past; this self-accusation has been rendered inoperative.   Mercy means that the toxicity of what can’t be changed; its toxicity has been changed as we soak ourselves in the mercy that God writes upon our hearts thanks to the sacrifice of his Son.

There’s much about my past that I don’t want to forget.  I fear that if I forget what I do well to remember, then the sin that overtook me in the past will overtake me again, and I don’t want to offend my Lord and disgrace myself once more.  Then I do well not to forget.  But I want with all my heart not to be tormented by what I dare not forget; I want not to collapse and crumble in self-accusation and self-condemnation. To be sure, I want soberly and sincerely always to be aware of how treacherous my heart is now inasmuch as I’ve never forgotten how treacherous my heart was then; at the same time, however, I don’t want to be poisoned by all of this or immobilized by it.  What I really want is this: I want to keep my past in view lest I cavalierly think I’m beyond stumbling, even as I want to move beyond my past lest I become its prisoner.

I’m persuaded that this is precisely how Paul regarded himself when he wrote Timothy simply yet profoundly, “I received mercy.”

We aren’t pretending for a minute that mercy is indulgence.  Mercy isn’t permission to re-offend.  Mercy rather is life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection reaching back into our past to assure us that our sin has been pardoned.         Mercy is the life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection doing something with our past so as to defuse the deadliness it will otherwise push into our present.

One aspect of the life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection is what we have learned. If through our sin and its aftermath we learned something crucial, then a miracle has occurred. If we learned as little, seemingly, as how powerfully yet unconsciously temptation imports its own rationalization, we’ve learned a huge lesson, one that will never find us saying again, “How could she have done it?” Aware now of how powerfully yet unconsciously temptation imports its own rationalization, we know exactly how she could have done it: we did it ourselves.

If through our blunder we finally lost our self-righteousness and our cocksure superiority, then a miracle has occurred – which is to say, nothing less than resurrection has occurred.

[b] Not our sin this time but our regrets, specifically our regrets arising from decisions and choices for which we can’t be blamed (sin has nothing to do with them) but which have turned out to be the wrong decisions or choices – what about such regrets?   The truth is, every day we have to make decisions, and occasionally we have to make huge decisions when we don’t have nearly as much information as we need, or we’re not acquainted with all the factors involved, or we can’t anticipate all the implications of choosing this or that – even as we know we have to make a decision.

It was when I studied under Dr. James Wilkes, a psychiatrist (now retired), in my last year of seminary that I learned how pervasive this matter is in life. Wilkes mentioned over and over in class that we are finite, frail fragile people with limited information and limited resources and limited perspective; and in the midst of this we find ourselves forced to make decisions that are going to be hugely significant – we know this – even as in all our limitations we can’t predict the outcomes.

Let me repeat: this time we’re not talking about sin for which we’re responsible; we’re talking about human limitation for which we aren’t responsible. Still, while we can’t be faulted for the decision we made, in some respects we’re stuck with the decision we made.

We had opportunity to sign on with a different employer.  Either we did or we didn’t, and the implications have been huge. We had opportunity to spend an inheritance in this way or in that, and we see made a choice we now wish we hadn’t.

What does it mean here to say that our times are in God’s hand?   We are not speaking now of God’s mercy (that is, forgiveness); we are speaking now of God’s providence.  To speak of God’s providence is to acknowledge, gladly and gratefully, that no “wrong” decision is ultimately wrong. To speak of God’s providence is to own the comfort he intends us to have in that his hands are never tied. Regardless of what the outcome has been of decisions we’ve made; regardless of the fact that twenty years later we see that we should have chosen option “B” instead of option “C”; regardless of what it has all spelled for us, it never finds God handcuffed.  There is no situation in our lives where he is handcuffed.  To speak of God’s providence, then, is to comfort ourselves in a glorious truth: there is nothing in the way our lives have unfolded which God can’t use for our blessing or the blessing of others.  There is no development that strikes us as a “lemon” from which God can’t make lemonade of some sort, for someone’s edification.

While we can never undo the decisions we made, and while we can never alter the outcome of those decisions, there remains much that can be changed. Self-cursing regret can be changed. Bitter self-denunciation can be changed. Futile remorse can be changed. It’s all changed as the God who is never handcuffed makes something glorious for us or others out of what strikes us as merely negative.  The power of Christ’s resurrection means that there’s no occurrence, however deadly, before which God is helpless.  He who raised his Son from the dead isn’t going to be handcuffed by a decision that I see twenty years later I shouldn’t have made even though at the time I was doing my best with the information I had.

As surely as God’s mercy is adequate for our sin, his providence is adequate for our finitude.

[c] What about resentments arising from the past, resentment that arises inasmuch as we’ve been victimized?         Injuries done to us often grate on us more than our own sins or mistakes just because we feel so very powerless about them.  We can’t even lessen the hurt by saying, “At least I have no one to blame but myself.” All we can do is fume as we recall how powerless we were when someone clobbered us. The wound smarts to this day.

It’s easy to find ourselves thinking about this accidentally, and soon find ourselves thinking about it deliberately.  As we continue to think about it we’re flooded with such resentment that we feel ourselves about to explode.  Soon we’re looking for a chance to even the score, and if the chance never comes, the resentment intensifies.

Yet to be stuck here is to be left dying a thousand painful deaths. One such death is too many; a thousand are pointless.  Therefore when this deadly, deadening situation has occurred once, we must start thinking about resurrection; specifically we must think about the resurrection of the crucified.

When we think of the crucified we must think first of what Jesus told us himself: “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.” He means that the sacrifice he makes is a sacrifice he makes. He’s not a doormat. He’s not a sucker. He’s not a laughable punching bag. He lays his life down. No one takes it from him – even though his slayers think they are taking it from him.

Then there’s only one thing to do. When we find ourselves clobbered, we aren’t going to fume about the powerlessness amidst which we were victimized. When we find ourselves clobbered, we are going to make our wound a sacrifice we offer to God.  We are going to deny that someone has taken something from us; instead we are going to offer it up to God.

There’s another way we can approach this matter.  Our Lord’s assassins torment and spear him.  They think they are masters of the situation.  But as soon as Jesus says “I lay down my life”, he absorbs it all. Since the last event in this scenario is his absorbing it all in himself, who is finally master of it all? He is. Indisputably he is.

Then this is how you and I must deal with wounds from our past that will otherwise fester within us until the pus of resentment renders us ugly to others and tormented in ourselves.  We are going to offer up as sacrifice to God the injury that someone else did us and in which she thought we were powerless and for which she preens himself as our master.  We are going to absorb it, defuse our resentment, and therein ensure that our assailant has mastered no one.

II: — Enough about the past; let’s move on to the future. How often have you heard it said, “We don’t know the future, and it’s good that we don’t, for if we knew what the future held we couldn’t stand it”? People say this because they fear that the future will be similar to the past, perhaps worse. They say this because they fear that having survived the past (however bad it was), the future might be so much worse that they won’t survive it.

They are right in one respect: the future is going to resemble the past. At least the future will resemble the past in that the future will bring accident, folly, misfortune, injury.

But this is no reason to dread the future.  We must remember that the future will also contain Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, ever working light and life and love in us, ever pressing his mercy upon us in the face of our sin, ever enfolding us in his providence amidst our limitation, ever defusing our resentment as he helps us turn wound into sacrifice and thereby victimization into victory. This is what the future holds for us.

Some people speak of the future as the “great unknown”.   To be sure, we don’t know the specific details of the future.   (Ten years from now will I be living in Mississauga , Midland or among the “great cloud of witnesses” who were granted their release ahead of me?) We don’t know the specific details, but neither are they ultimately important. Jesus Christ is ultimately important, and he is our future. One way of understanding the future (the most helpful way, I’m convinced) is to see the future as the time in which Christ comes to us in the midst of what we aren’t able to foresee.  The future isn’t what hasn’t happened yet.   The future is Christ coming to us in the midst of what we can’t anticipate.

A week ago (Christmas) we praised God for the gift of his Son, Christ Jesus our Lord. We thanked God that at last the long-promised One came among us.  But even as he lives among us he’s not bound by us.  He is Lord of time. For this reason he who is among us is simultaneously out in front of us, ahead of us. Because he’s always out in front of us he’s always coming toward us with his promise to bring life and light and love amidst all that we can’t foresee. While there’s much we can’t foresee, we can foresee him.  And to foresee him is to anticipate the future not with misgiving or even dread, but rather to move toward the future confidently just because we know that as we move toward the future, he is already moving toward us.

III: — All of which brings us to the present.  I’m not going to say much about the present, because I don’t think there’s much to be said. I don’t think there’s much to be said about the present in that I don’t think there’s much to the present.  The present is simply the borderline between the past and the future. The present is simply that line, finer than a hair, in our travelling from past to future.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that I think there’s little to the present when we are told that shallow people, superficial people, live only for the present. We all understand what’s meant. Shallow people do live exclusively for the present inasmuch as they are determined to deny their past and determined to ignore the future.  Christ’s people, however, have no interest in either denying the past or ignoring the future. We belong to him who is Lord of time, Lord of past and future.

Still, something can be said about the present.  Paul announces, “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.” In other words, right now is the hour to receive God’s favour.   Today is the day to look for and thank God for his mercy that bleaches our sin, his providence that cancels our regret, and his truth that shrivels our resentment. Today is the day to own afresh that what we call the future is the risen One coming to us and holding us in a grip that will never abandon us, abandon us to what we haven’t been able to foresee.   “Now is the acceptable time.”

Now is the acceptable time just because all our times – past, future, present – are in God’s hand.

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           January 2006

Psalm 48

[1] “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. If you, Jerusalem, are not more precious to me than my highest joy, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.” Does anyone feel as strongly about the city of Mississauga as the psalmist felt about Jerusalem?

Actually, the psalmist doesn’t feel so very strongly about Jerusalem just because he happens to like this one city as other people tell us they love London or Paris or New York. The psalmist loves Jerusalem inasmuch as he believes it to be the city of God. “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God“, he exclaims in Psalm 48.

So — Jerusalem is the city of God for the psalmist, gathering together as it does the people of God. For two thousand years Christians have treasured the book of Psalms; for two thousand years Christians have interpreted references to Jerusalem or Zion as references to the church. Then here is a question we cannot avoid putting to ourselves today: do we feel as strongly about the church as the psalmist felt about Jerusalem, Zion? The unnamed author of the book of Hebrews cries, “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” (Heb. 12:28) To be sure, the kingdom of God cannot be shaken. But what about the church? Can it be shaken? Has it been shaken? Is it so “all shook up” that we can say of it what is said of a boxer who is out on his feet, “He doesn’t have a leg underneath him”?

 [2] Before we answer the question too quickly we must be sure to understand something crucial. The word “Jerusalem” is the anglicized version of HYER SHALOM — city of peace, city of salvation. In English the word “peace” means little more than “the absence of conflict”; but in Hebrew “shalom” means the harmony and wholeness of the creation as it came forth from God’s hand, unmarred by wickedness, sin, evil. But right now the creation is dreadfully marred; grotesquely disfigured, in fact. Salvation, then, is the whole creation (including human beings) wholly healed. Shalom is therefore the kingdom of God. HYER SHALOM, Jerusalem, is the city where the salvation of God, the kingdom of God, is to appear, appear unmistakably, appear uniquely.

At the same time there is another side to Jerusalem. Jesus tells us that Jerusalem is the city which slays the prophets. And so it does. The city that is supposed to be the one spot on a ravaged earth where the salvation of God appears turns out to be the one spot where the messengers of God are most thoroughly abused. (Tell me: are God’s messengers ever abused in the church , even though the church is where God’s salvation is known, celebrated, and commended — supposedly?) More than merely abuse the prophets, Jerusalem is the city that crucifies Israel’s Messiah, crucifies the Son of God — and is glad to do so!

My question again: do you feel as positive about the church as the psalmist felt in Psalm 137 when he said, “If I forget Jerusalem I deserve to lose my right arm”? Do you feel as positive about the church as the psalmist felt in Psalm 48, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God”?

We must not think that the psalmist is naive. He is not looking at Jerusalem through rose-coloured glasses. No sooner does he exult in Jerusalem (verse 1) than he adds (verse 2) “Mount Zion, in the far north”. “Far north”, in Hebrew, means “in the future, in the eschaton; the Jerusalem that is to come, the new Jerusalem, let down from heaven” (as the book of Revelation speaks of it). The psalmist knows that the earthly Jerusalem is both a testimony to God’s salvation and a disgraceful stinkhole: both. There is enough truth in the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem possible; there is enough falsehood in the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem necessary.

 [3] You and I do not view the church through rose-coloured glasses. We know about the Renaissance popes: wealthy, promiscuous, corrupt, cunning to an extent that would have delighted Machiavelli. We know about the church in early 16th century Scotland: it owned half the nation’s property. We know about the New England zealots who hanged women as witches. We know about the 19th century American Methodist bishops who not only dismissed Methodist forefather John Wesley’s outrage at slavery but even became slaveowners themselves. We know about the churches that refused to welcome black people at worship — even barred them from worship — long after professional sports had integrated both players and the paying public.

 [4] We do not view the church through rose-coloured spectacles. Neither does the psalmist. The psalmist has only the most realistic appraisal of Jerusalem. There is enough truth to the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem possible, and enough falsehood to the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem necessary. But make no mistake: there is truth, salvation, shalom in the earthly Jerusalem! The word of God and the truth of God and the might of God are here! For this reason, the psalmist tells us, the kings of the nations flee Jerusalem in panic whenever they approach it. The kings of the nations begin by assuming that Jerusalem is nothing; a puff, mere froth, entirely dismissable. Once they have meddled with Jerusalem, however, they flee in panic.

I am always sobered when I ponder how the nations’ rulers react to the church. The church appears to be a pushover; yet when the rulers of the nations begin to push, they find it unyielding. More than unyielding, they find it a threat to them.

When Hitler came to power there were 18,000 Protestant pastors in Germany. The call was sounded to form the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church insisted that Hitler was not be heard or heeded. It declared, “Jesus Christ is the one word of God that we must obey in life and in death. We deny that the church can have a fuehrer apart from Jesus Christ…”. When the call was sounded 6,000 pastors joined up. What did the other 12,000 have for a backbone? Jello? Karl Barth, whom the Gestapo quickly removed from his university position in the course of a Saturday morning lecture; Barth had a different perspective on it. “Six thousand?”, said Barth, that’s far too many! One-third of the clergy can’t have perception enough to know what’s going on and courage enough to be of any help. There are plainly far too many whom we can’t count on. We’ve got to get the numbers down!” He didn’t have long to wait. After one month the 6,000 had shrunk to 4,000; another month, to 2,000 — and so on, until that critical core was reached, that earthly Jerusalem that would make the new Jerusalem believable.

Why was Hitler unrelenting in his persecution of so small a number? Because Hitler knew that testimony to Jesus Christ is like yeast. It appears insignificant itself, yet it spreads everywhere and affects everything, leaving nothing untouched. Its influence is so pervasive as to be uncontrollable and undeniable. The psalmist, grateful for Jerusalem and confident of the new Jerusalem; the psalmist declares, “As we have heard, so we have seen in the city…which God establishes for ever.” “As we have heard, so we have seen”; it’s the language of testimony! Testimony is like yeast: uncontrollable and undeniable. Hitler knew this much.

When John Wesley found himself afire with the gospel in the midst of a church where neither clergy nor people appeared “lit” he did not bemoan the spiritual inertia on all sides and conclude that the situation was hopeless. Instead he announced, “Give me a dozen people who fear no one but God and hate nothing but sin…; just give me a dozen.” What he didn’t know — but soon learned — was that the dozen (and more) already existed. (Of course. When Elijah thought that he stood alone, God reminded him that there were 7,000 in Israel who had not bowed their knee to Baal.) (I Kings 19:18)

 [5] My confidence in God’s promise-keeping faithfulness is undiminished. What he has promised he will do. There isn’t so much as a dust-speck of doubt in me. And when our Lord tells us that he will build his church on his people’s public acknowledgement of him as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God (Matt. 16:18); when he tells us that not even the powers of death, not even attacks from the spiritual underworld, will crumble it; when our Lord promises this I believe him. As long as Jesus Christ himself is held up in the truth of his gospel his community will thrive; ultimately his community will triumph gloriously, however silly or sinful the antics of pseudo-disciples who claim to be avant-garde but in fact are dangerous and laughable in equal measure.

Wesley again. In the early days of Methodism Wesley’s people were accused of two things: fanaticism and immorality. “We aren’t fanatics”, Wesley replied, “for however exuberant we might appear, we do not elevate ourselves above scripture, the mark of fanaticism. In the second place”, he continued, “we are not immoral people, even though there are some ‘bad apples’ among us whose ill-repute has been ascribed to us.” In a development which was nothing less than heartbreaking, one of the worst of the ‘bad apple’ situations concerned Wesley’s sister and brother-in-law. The sister was Martha; the brother-in-law, an Anglican clergyman of apparent Methodist fervour, Westley Hall. Martha and her husband had ten children, nine of whom died in infancy. As child succeeded child Martha became worn out. She needed help in the home; a live-in housekeeper, Betty Greenaway, was hired to assist her. Meanwhile, Westley Hall had become a notorious philanderer. Needless to say, in no time he had impregnated the family’s housekeeper. By the time word of this reached John Wesley, Westley Hall had absented himself from wife Martha for an extended period. Wesley could hardly believe that his brother-in-law had behaved so scandalously and humiliated his sister so shamefully. Wesley went to visit his sister; once with her, he had no trouble believing any of it. It was all as bad as reported, and worse.

Subsequently Westley Hall deserted his wife Martha, leaving her in the village where she had buried nine children, leaving her with inadequate finances. All of this was public knowledge. The anti-Methodist newspapers gleefully publicized the deplorable details. One newspaper article intoned, “On Friday morning [The Reverend Westley Hall] set out for London, having first stripped his wife…of all her childbed linen (he even stole his wife’s sheets!), and whatever he could convert into money, leaving her in the deepest distress.” What did Martha do in her distress? She forgave her husband; when he sashayed home three months later she took him back. One day Martha slipped out of the house to meet brother John in a downtown rendezvous, John having travelled once more to visit her in order to support her in her anguish. While she was downtown her husband, incorrigible yet, locked her out of the house. Then he left her again, and once again she took him back. He left again. By now the housekeeper, Betty Greenaway, was ready to deliver. A physician was not called, since in class-stratified England a physician was not to be brought into such outrageous scandal. Instead a midwife was procured. By now Martha’s bank balance was only six pounds. She paid five pounds for the midwife, and then spent her remaining pound on a coach ticket for her villainous husband who had informed her he wanted to leave London and return to her. In no time he had deserted her again, this time with a woman whom he took to Barbados. For the rest of her life Martha had to be supported by her two brothers, John and Charles.

The point to the lengthy story is this. For decades Westley Hall was a disgrace to Methodism. For decades mockers and detractors snickered and pointed to him every time Wesley’s catholic evangelicalism was mentioned. Those who opposed the Methodist work had a field-day writing up pamphlets and tracts and newspaper articles which gloated over the disgrace of one of Methodism’s best-known figures, The Reverend Westley Hall, philanderer “extraordinaire”. Nevertheless; NEVERTHELESS — God honoured and owned and used and magnified and crowned the Methodist work in a way and to an extent that we can scarcely comprehend today!

Jesus Christ has promised that where he is lifted up in the truth of his gospel nothing will crumble his community; nothing — not the powers of death, not notorious scandal protracted for decades, not the theological treachery and the spiritual inertia of those who style themselves church leaders and spokespersons. We forget that the word “Methodist” was originally a term of contempt; the word became even more contemptible after Wesley himself was ignited and thousands with him. But what is human abasement compared to the exaltation of God? What is momentary humiliation compared to God’s eternal vindication? Every time I read of the brothers-in-law, John Wesley and Westley Hall, I take heart afresh, knowing that the gospel will always authenticate itself and vindicate the faithful, especially in the face of every kind of fakery, forgery and phoniness.

The psalmist writes, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God”. God is greatly to be praised in HYER SHALOM, the city of salvation. Jerusalem is the city of salvation, even as the phonies within it render it the city of destruction. Nevertheless, the psalmist knows that the ‘bad apples’, however bad, cannot overturn the promise of God! For this reason I am undiscouraged concerning the church. The promise of God concerning his people perdures; the promise of God concerning Christ’s community is operative now; and soon the promise of God is going to be verified publicly.

 [6] The psalmist is not at all naive about Jerusalem. Jerusalem is Jerusalem, the city of salvation and the city of destruction; both. Yet because God keeps the promises he makes these two truths are not weighted equally. The city of salvation always outweighs the city of destruction; always. For this reason the psalmist tells his readers, “Walk around Zion; circle it; count its towers; take note of its ramparts; go through its citadels.” In other words, before you despair over the corruption of Jerusalem stroll through the city and take note of just how glorious the city is with its splendid towers and ramparts and citadels; take note of its grandeur and its splendour.

This is exactly how I feel about the church: its assorted riches are glorious. I am everlastingly grateful for mediaeval monks in their candle-flickering cells who kept learning alive during the darkness of the dark ages. I should never want to be without Roman Catholics who will at least recognize the humanness of the almost-born in the face of the world’s heartless dismissal. Who would want to be without the Anglican Prayerbook in view of the fact that Thomas Cranmer’s genius is now the common property of every denomination’s liturgy? The Calvinists remind us that God is irreducibly GOD, uncompromisingly holy, unfadingly majestic. Whenever I think of the Lutherans my heart is flooded with the treasures of dear old Martin himself. One of his nuggets: “Do you want to know the cure for anxiety? Stop looking at yourself and living in yourself. Instead live out of yourself by living in someone else. Live in Christ by faith; live in your neighbour through love. Then you will never find yourself fretting over your fribbles.” The Eastern Orthodox Church is an anvil that has outworn every hammer pounding upon it for centuries. Stencilled on every eucharistic wafer that its people use in their communion service are the words, “Jesus Christ conquers”. (Ask Alexander Solzhenitsyn what a communion service means according to the Eastern Orthodox rite.) And then there are the Baptists. What distinguishes the Baptists is not their doctrine of baptism (as so many people incorrectly think). What distinguishes the Baptists is their understanding of the church (to which their view of baptism merely points). The Baptists insist on the separation of church and state. They know there can be no compromise between Christ and Caesar. They know that a state church, an established church, is a contradiction in terms. The church is not, must not think itself to be, should never be perceived to be the religious arm of the nation or the government or a political party; neither must the church ever be the religious booster of an ideology or an “ism” or a lobby — for the church’s Lord, so far from supporting the principalities and powers, has defeated them and exposed them for the wretched pretenders that they are.

What about the renewal groups within The United Church of Canada? Together we do not constitute a denomination. But certainly we constitute what our foreparents called an ecclesiola in ecclesia; we constitute a concentrated yeast tablet in a church which appears to be unleavened.

Even so, we cannot accurately say we are a yeast tablet in a church which is unleavened. After all, the renewal movements represent a majority within the denomination. In other words, The UCC is plainly far more leavened than we commonly think. Then perhaps the most accurate thing to say is that we are a concentrated yeast table whose vocation it is to leaven even more a denomination that is already leavened to a greater extent than denominational spokespersons and bureaucrats will admit!

We should walk around Jerusalem frequently. The architecture of the city of God is magnificent. It is endlessly varied, limitlessly grand, boundlessly inspiring.

It is Jerusalem, the city of God, the church, that God so loves that he will perfect it; by his grace he will render it “Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.” What is this but the picturesque anticipation of the apostle Paul’s picturesque conviction that God, by his grace, will render the church that bride of Christ that is “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish”? (Eph. 5:27)

Believing this without reservation, I refuse to be discouraged. I cannot count the number of people who have sidled up to me and remarked patronizingly, “Why don’t you give up, Shepherd. You and your renewal ‘types’ might as well quit. You have no chance of changing anything.” My cheerful reply is always twofold. “Friend, in the first place I stand where I stand not in order to change the denomination, but in order to make sure that it doesn’t change me. In the second place when I see the Berlin wall crumbled and the once-mighty USSR fragmented, I know that before the inscrutable providence of God any self-confident monolith may be only hours from crumbling and fragmenting.” But of course God’s work of disassembly is only for the sake of bringing forth that bride “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.”

 [7] Isn’t this where the sermon should end? The psalmist began Psalm 48 by speaking of the city of the great King, the church. Throughout the psalm he said much about the church. Finally he urged us to contemplate the church’s catholicity and the church’s magnificence. Since the psalm appears to be concluded, the sermon should be concluded.

Except that the psalm isn’t concluded. For even as he exults in the splendours of the church the psalmist finds himself overwhelmed by the holy one of Israel himself, by the living God who cannot be reduced to or confused with anything, however glorious, not even that church which he has promised to bring to himself without spot or wrinkle or blemish. “Walk around Jerusalem; note her glories”, says the psalmist, “that you may tell the next generation that THIS IS GOD, our God for ever and ever.”

Just as John the Dipper pointed away from himself to him whose shoes he wasn’t worthy to untie, so the church ever points away from itself to him who is the church’s — and the world’s — unique Lord, Judge and Saviour. As you and I and all God’s people point to him, in company with brother John before us, we shall resoundingly tell the next generation that this is God, our God, and he will be their guide as he has been ours, for ever and ever.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do
far more abundantly than all that we ask or think,
to him be glory IN THE CHURCH AND IN CHRIST JESUS
to all generations, for ever and ever. (Eph.3:20)

Amen

                                                         Victor A. Shepherd         

May, 1994

Psalm 51:1-14          Romans 5:1-5          Mark 3:1-6

Why doesn’t the church accentuate the positive?   Why do we persist in the “miserable” prayer of confession every Sunday morning? Since guilt is burdensome, why don’t we stop using the word and rid ourselves as well of everything associated with it?   We don’t do this for many reasons, not the least of which is this: a person with no sense of guilt is to be pitied.  More to the point, a person with no sense of guilt is to be dreaded. A person with no sense of guilt is a psychopath, utterly conscienceless.  Psychopaths are aware that certain behaviours are followed by the severest social sanctions: if you rob a bank, you go to jail.  Psychopaths, however, have no sense of wrong.         They think a jail sentence for bank robbery to be social arbitrariness, nothing more. Psychopaths can never be trusted. They are housed in a maximum-security institution in Penetanguishene.  The person with no capacity for guilt is the person who has to be locked up and never let out. At the same time, all of us are aware that the burden of guilt can be so very burdensome as to be crushing.

I: — The sermon is only a minute old, and already I’ve used the word “guilt” several times. When I use the word am I referring to a state or a feeling? Most people have a feeling in mind whenever they hear the word “guilt”.   The judge in criminal court, however, has only a state in mind.  When a judge declares the accused to be guilty before the law, the judge is describing the offender’s state, the offender’s condition. The judge doesn’t know how the offender feels, and may not care.  Undoubtedly a judge pronounces to be guilty many offenders who don’t feel guilty at all. Still, we all agree it’s appropriate for someone who has done wrong to feel guilty. It’s appropriate for state and feeling to match up. When people who are guilty also feel guilty, their guilt (feeling) is called “real guilt.”  When people who haven’t done wrong feel guilty none the less, their guilt (feeling) is called “imaginary.”

Suppose I feel guilty when (according to most people) there’s no guilty state. I eat a piece of chocolate cake (one piece) when I’m convinced I need to lose ten pounds. Most people would see my guilt-feeling as purely imaginary, trivial even.  Calling it trivial, however, does nothing to reduce the feeling.  The feeling of imaginary guilt can be so very intense as to be immobilising.

Imaginary guilt is said to arise largely from taboos we absorbed during our childhood, or from taboos acquired from our social environment, our colleagues, our friends, our parents (chiefly our parents.) We move into adult life with our childhood taboo-system firmly in place (and no less firmly in place for having been acquired semiconsciously, even unconsciously.)   We move further into adult life with our society’s taboo-system in place, always aware that there are social penalties for violating social taboos. Many people are embarrassed to admit what they feel guilty about, I’ve found, because the taboo appears, from a rational standpoint, to be trivial.         As trivial and arbitrary as they tell themselves it is, their guilt-feeling remains. Not only does it remain, it frequently goes ever so deep and is ever so destructive.

“I’ve got the solution”, someone insists, “the guilt associated with parental upbringing and social convention is always and everywhere imaginary. Since it’s all imaginary, let’s do our best to forget it and focus on the guilt that’s real.” Such a “solution”, however, is no solution at all.
Anthropologists tell us, for instance, that all societies have a taboo concerning incest.  Does the fact of the taboo mean that all guilt concerning incest is imaginary, imaginary only? As for my parental upbringing, my parents taught me that murder is wrong; dishonesty of any sort, theft, slander, lying – all are wrong.  Does the fact that my parents taught me these are wrong trivialise the guilt associated with murder and theft?

At the same time, as we mature we all recognise that there’s imaginary guilt around many parental edicts that we have come to disregard. Concerning these parental edicts we now merely smile and wonder why we were so long shedding the guilt associated with them, so pointless is it.  The question still has to be asked and answered, however, as to how we come to sort out real and imaginary guilt.  On what basis do we distinguish them?

Distinguishing them isn’t as easy as we might first think, since both kinds are pervasively intertwined in us.         Because untangling the two kinds is more difficult than expected, we are prone to pursue the “quick fix” of labelling our guilt as all imaginary or all real.  I begin by telling myself that my guilt is all imaginary.   The amateurish “pop” psychology ready-to-hand in our society aids and abets this. Besides, labelling my guilt as all imaginary makes it easier to live with until I can dump it. But before long I am driven to admit to myself, “It’s not working.”  After a while I know, deep down, that I’m making excuses for myself where there are no excuses; I’m letting myself off much too easily; and I’m letting myself off where I let no one else off.

Then perhaps my guilt is all real.  I deserve to feel as bad as I feel. I know I’m a defective person, defective on many fronts; and if ever I appear in danger of forgetting this, there’s no shortage of people to remind me.  Plainly I am as bad as I feel.”  After a while, however, I find I can’t live here.  My responsibility for my guilt is more than I can endure.  The burden is so very burdensome as to be overwhelming.  In order to ease my burden I tell myself I’m being much too hard on myself. Back goes the pendulum toward imaginary guilt.  Back and forth I swing. First I think I’m tormenting myself unrealistically; then I think I’m excusing myself irresponsibly. Finally I shout that regardless of how often I change the labels on my guilt-feelings I don’t feel any less guilty and I’m still confused as to whether I should feel guilty.

The pattern I’ve just described repeats itself again and again in life. Someone isn’t the business success that his cousin is.  He feels guilty about this, since he can’t provide the standard of living for his family that his cousin can, and feels worse when his wife keeps reminding him of this. A week later he tells himself that he needn’t feel guilty; after all, he never had the opportunities and “breaks” that his cousin had.  Soon, however, he tells himself that he’s making excuses for himself and should “own up” to his failure.  Now he tells himself he’s never been a business success because he’s simply not as smart as his cousin, nor as creative, nor as adventuresome. Two weeks later, however, he can’t live with such severity concerning himself; he tells himself his cousin “got ahead” just because his cousin isn’t always honest. Back and forth he swings. He’s no further ahead in his self-understanding; and his guilt-feelings, whether real or imaginary, are no less intense.

I have found that most unmarried people feel guilty for being unmarried. First the single woman tells herself that her guilt is entirely imaginary.  It’s not her fault that no one’s ever asked her to marry, is it?   Then she begins to wonder, moves on to doubting herself, and finally accuses herself: why wouldn’t it be her fault that no one has ever asked her to marry?  A variant of this theme is the person guilt-ridden at being single again. After all, marital failures don’t happen spontaneously; they have to be someone’s fault. In all such cases people oscillate when they try to sort out the extent to which they are blameworthy for developments in their lives.  When they are easy on themselves, they come to suspect themselves of being too easy, unrealistically easy.  When they are hard on themselves, they soon can’t live with their own severity. Back and forth they go, their guilt-feelings fixed fast, even becoming more intense.

The real guilt/imaginary guilt teeter-totter is complicated by the fact that imaginary guilt is often a smokescreen behind which real guilt hides. As long as I can preoccupy myself with imaginary guilt I won’t have to come to terms with what is giving rise to my real guilt, all of which means I won’t have to set my house in order.

Think of this situation. My wife and I are asked to a neighbour’s for coffee and dessert.  I sashay over in my house-painting trousers and my leaf-raking shoes. When we arrive at the neighbour’s home I find everyone better dressed.  I feel terrible about my social faux pas, guilty as can be. Then I tell myself that my guilt is imaginary.         After all, how was I to know how others would be dressed?   And wasn’t it the host’s responsibility to tell me?   The host is the guilty one here.  Any guilt-feeling I might have is purely imaginary.

But is it? Actually, my imaginary guilt disguises real guilt.  You see, I don’t like this particular neighbour.  He never cleans up after his dog.  I went to his home in my shabby clothes because I couldn’t care less about him and his silly coffee party.  Consciously I couldn’t care less; unconsciously I’d even like to embarrass him. As far as I’m concerned that man is a 14-karat jerk.  What’s more, just before my wife and I left our house we had a “tiff”, a “spat”, and as usual I lost.  I lose nearly all such tiffs and I’m tired of losing.  I know, she told me not to wear my house-painting trousers, but defying my wife was the only way I could re-assert myself in the face of my most recent domestic defeat. I thought I was inwardly saving face (my face) by letting her know I can’t be suppressed. (Hence the shabby clothes.) It turns out I was losing face (again), losing face publicly, angering her still more and causing my neighbour to think that I am a 14-karat jerk.

Much imaginary guilt is a smokescreen that hides real guilt.

II: — Perhaps you are thinking that our guilt-situation is so very complex, complicated even, that we shall never find our way out of the maze.  Yet we shall. We find our way out as the gospel brings us out.  Jesus Christ brings us out as he comes upon us and seizes us and soaks us in his unique truth and mercy and wisdom.

In the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry his opponents hounded him, waiting to catch him infringing this custom or that code or yet another taboo. When they finally caught him – healing a man on the Sabbath or allowing his disciples to eat without ritually dipping their hands or befriending those the society loves to hate – they jumped on him saying, “You’ve broken the rules. You’ve infringed the code.” Our Lord’s opponents think that real guilt arises when the code is violated or the custom infringed. His followers, on the other hand, know that real guilt arises inasmuch as we are guilty persons before God. While sin is something I do, it isn’t primordially something I do; it isn’t fundamentally, originally, something I do. At bottom sin is something I am. (Psalm 51) The sin that I do is but the excrescence of the sin that I am.  In the presence of Jesus Christ Peter doesn’t exclaim, “Oh, my gosh. I’ve done the wrong thing.” Rather he cries, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”

Opponents of Jesus compare themselves against a list of rules and note that they break 50% of them. If ever they begin to feel guilty about this they console themselves with the fact that they break only 50%; this means they keep 50%, and the man down the street manages only 40%. Disciples of Jesus, on the other hand, recognize with Peter that the code-mentality is entirely beside the point.  Followers of Jesus know that their proximity to him discloses not something they’ve done wrong here or there; their proximity to him discloses them, discloses themselves in their person, to be in the wrong before God. “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” The apostle Paul adds, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”   The characteristic human deficit, which deficit is as deep in us as blood poisoning, is that we don’t mirror God’s glory.  We were created for this, and it is meant to characterize us.  It doesn’t now.   All of us? All of us equally?   All of us lack such glory equally despite the unequal attainments we undeniably display? All of us lack God’s glory, which glory is the human good, despite the different degrees of virtue which more moral and less moral people exemplify?   Yes. We all fall short of God’s glory equally.

The spiritual predicament of humankind (in other words, the predicament plain and simple) isn’t that we do this or that wrong; our predicament is that we are in the wrong before God. The first impact the gospel makes upon us is to disclose our spiritual condition.

The second impact of the gospel, the second consequence of our Lord’s presence and power, is that he puts in the right before God all who welcome him.  To cling to him is find ourselves put in the right before God, to be given new status, new standing. “Justification” is a word that many Protestants throw around but few understand.         To be justified, biblically, isn’t to be excused.   (Sinners can never be excused.)  To be justified is to be put in the right before God, to be given new standing with him. To be justified is to be given the same standing before God as the standing of that Son with whom the Father is ever pleased.  Faith clings to the Son with whom the Father is pleased.

At the time of the Sixteenth Century Reformation John Calvin spoke of justification as “the chief hinge on which religion turns.”   He was right. Justification is indeed the chief hinge on which faith turns.  Justification opens the door to peace with God and peace within ourselves. Justification opens the door to release from anxiety and freedom to venture.  Justification is the chief hinge on which everything turns. It swings open the door of prisons that have held people fast for years and lets them step out into the sunlight of life.

Martin Luther lit up every time he thought about justification.  Reading scripture with exquisitely fine attention to the logic of the text Luther spoke of justification as a breathtaking exchange.  Jesus Christ exchanges all that is his for all that is mine.  As sinner I am sunk in guilt, shame, curse, death; as the righteous one Jesus Christ throbs with glory, blessing, light and life.  Justification means that he, of his incomprehensible mercy takes on my guilt, shame, curse and death even as he clothes me in his glory, blessing, light and life. Clothed now in all that he is, I exult in that new identity which is mine for life and will be mine as well on the day of judgement.

Two hundred years after Luther, Valentius Loescher, a Lutheran theologian, wrote, Iustificatio est articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae (1718).   “Justification is the article by which the church stands and falls.” Articulus: “article”? Actually the Latin word articulus means not only “article” or “hinge”; it also means “moment” or “point”, as well as “crisis.”   Justification by faith, the glorious exchange that occurs as Jesus Christ relieves me of all that’s mine and bestows upon me all that’s his: this is the moment, the point, the critical issue where the church stands or falls. It’s the moment, the point, the critical issue that separates church from fake church.

Scripture makes plain that justification is pardon or forgiveness: all these words mean the same.  To be justified is to be pardoned is to be forgiven.  When we speak of forgiveness, however, we must be careful that we aren’t misled by a line in the Apostles’ Creed.  The creed states, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”   Strictly speaking, sin is never forgiven simply because sin doesn’t exist apart from sinners.   Sinners are forgiven. I myself am forgiven. For this reason Paul exults, “Being justified by faith we ourselves have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:1) “There is now no condemnation for those persons who are in Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 8:1)

The second impact of the gospel is that we who are in the wrong before God are put in the right with him as we cling to the One who has promised to hold us so as never to let us go.

The third impact of the gospel is that forgiveness provides sanctuary, provides protection against inner and outer assault, provides safe living space in which we can come, in our own way and in our own time, to understand what guilt is real and what imaginary.  Justification provides the security within which we can come to terms, however long it takes, with where we should feel guilty and where we shouldn’t. It provides an anxiety-free zone that allows us the time and space and freedom to come to terms with our upbringing, social convention, our growing awareness of God’s truth, our new-found self-perception.  It provides an anxiety-free zone in which we can reflect on what we’ve been taught, what we’ve learned ourselves, where our parents meant well but hindered us none the less, where we absorbed opinions that we thought to be the soul of truth but which we now see to be anything but. Forgiveness or justification gives us breathing space, and this breathing space allows us to revisit ever so much about us, reassess it, and revise whatever has to be revised. Forgiveness or justification allows us to do this, even requires us to do this, without putting us back on that teeter-totter that always oscillates between irresponsible self-excusing and unendurable self-accusing.

“Why doesn’t the church accentuate the positive?”   What we have heard about guilt this morning in church is more positive than anything we are ever going to hear about guilt anywhere else.

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                               

November 2006

Psalm 62

I: — How “alone” are you? How “alone” do you feel? As alone as the psalmist? “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”         “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He only is my rock, my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly moved.”

William Stringfellow, the American Anglican lawyer whose grasp of theology (he was self-taught) was as precise as grasp of the law (he was taught at Harvard Law School); Stringfellow, like any Harvard Law graduate, was offered elegance and luxury yet preferred to open a store-front law practice in Harlem among the dispossessed of that slum.         Why did he do this? Why not leave that kind of law practice to less talented lawyers who couldn’t maintain a practice among “choosier” and more affluent clients in any case? Stringfellow said it was on account of his vocation; while he was a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics he had learned the difference between career and vocation.

Stringfellow’s isolation in his vocation, however intense, was considerably less than his isolation in church and society.  For instance, he campaigned ardently in the 1960s to have women ordained in the Anglican church of the USA , the campaign coming to a climax in Washington Cathedral where a disdainful bishop treated him like a non-entity.  A year or two later the FBI arrested him for harbouring Father Daniel Berrigan, a high-profile protester against the Viet Nam war. Stringfellow’s former law partner told me, when Maureen and I were last in New York City, that Stringfellow was devastated at the prospect of going to prison, in view of what happens to small, slightly-built men in prison.  In one of his fourteen books Stringfellow spoke of what it is to be alone, so very alone, that (as he put it) “God is the only witness to your existence”.

Have you ever felt yourself so alone that God is the only witness to your existence? The psalmist had. “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”   He doesn’t say it once in Psalm 62; he says it (or something like it) five times in the first eight verses!   He couldn’t imagine himself more alone.

Why do we feel alone?   Chiefly, I think, because we are not understood.   However firmly we may know who we are, none of us can articulate it adequately. However resilient our self-identity, we cannot communicate this truth to others.  The result is that people are left having to “read” us and then guess who we are.

To be sure, other people can read something about us.  They can read virtually everything that is only skin-deep in us, everything that is on the surface. They can also read much that is below the surface, those quirks and character-traits about us that we think no one else sees but that in fact we are displaying all the time.  Yet even as we smile at how much more about us people can read than we used to think, we still feel they can’t read us at all in our innermost, deepest core. Our innermost core they don’t penetrate to, don’t see, don’t know.  And therefore there is a part of us, the most significant part, the unique part, that they don’t meet and therefore cannot affirm.

Not only do we feel alone inasmuch as our profoundest “self” isn’t recognized, we feel alone in addition inasmuch as we know there is something about us that arouses antipathy in others.  I don’t mean that there is a nastiness in us or similar character-flaw that arouses antipathy in others.  I mean that whatever there is about us that stands out, however much we may try not to stand out; this attracts hostility.  The psalmist cries to himself yet has his detractors in mind, “How long will you set upon a man to shatter him…?   [You] plan to thrust him down from his eminence.”

Any person possessed of unusual ability, however slightly unusual; any person possessed of even a smidgen of excellence by that fact becomes eminent. The peculiar combination of excellence and eminence irks, really irks, those who are less excellent and less eminent.  The less eminent turn mean.

You don’t have to be possessed of excellence in terms of achievement. You merely have to be slightly prominent. You earn more money than most people? In no time you are hearing that you are stuck-up or self-important.  You are better educated than most?   In no time you are hearing of character-flaws you never knew yourself to have. Your job or your income or your ancestry or anything at all renders you socially more prominent than most? In no time you are hearing that you may be invited to all the major social functions, but you still speak with an accent; and besides, your daughter had to get married, didn’t she?   When such a word reaches you — as it always does — you feel terribly alone once more.

What it was that made the psalmist eminent I do not know.  Perhaps it was simply that he appeared to be the spiritual giant that he was in fact, and appeared such amidst the spiritual pygmies all around him. Or perhaps it was that he could write poetry the world will never be without, while they didn’t have a line of poetry in them.  In any case the psalmist knew that to be eminent in any respect for any reason arouses envy in others.  The envious turn nasty instantly.  The psalmist knows the icy isolation that envy visits on those who are even slightly distinguished.         He felt himself to be a leaning wall, a tottering fence, whom the less-distinguished envious would simply love to push over.   He cries out in his aloneness, “They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse.”   Then he cries to himself, for the umpteenth time, “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”

II: — Where do we turn when we are engulfed by our aloneness?   We naturally look to other men and women.  But which others? The others to whom we look are either “those of low estate”, in the words of the psalmist, or “those of high estate.”

The most pointed attempt at finding recognition and affirmation and alleviation of aloneness through “those of low estate” has to have been the role of the proletariat in the communist revolution.  Once capitalism had been abolished, the Marxists said, extraordinary virtue would appear in the “lumpen proletariat”, the huge mass of those of low estate.  The surge of virtue newly appearing in the these “lower classes” (so-called) would overcome every last distress in the human situation, including the aloneness that is more-or-less everyone’s predicament as well as the aloneness that nasty capitalists force on working class people.

What happened? The “triumph” of the proletariat gave rise to a savagery, misery, bleakness the 20th century had not yet seen.  Who are more alone, more isolated, more lonely than those in Marxist lands who cannot trust their neighbours at all?  When I have been driven to say with the psalmist, “For God alone my soul waits in silence”, I have never thought that what I needed most profoundly was part or all of the Saturday night crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens .

Then what about those of high estate?  The psalmist says they are a delusion.  He means that it is unrealistic to expect the rich and the socially prominent to overcome our aloneness.  Hobnobbing with those of high estate may make us feel less isolated for a minute. (Isn’t it pleasant to be able to say we had lunch with the mayor and supper with the president of General Motors?)   But it’s only for a moment. When sober reflection comes upon us again we know that having spent an afternoon with Jean Chretien or Wayne Gretzky or Margaret Atwood — however “heady” at the time — doesn’t profoundly remedy the aloneness we find so piercing. Name-dropping is surely one of the more pathetic attempts at gaining recognition, overcoming aloneness, through hanging around with the famous, the illustrious, the prestigious, the stars of athletics or academia or politics or entertainment. We don’t have access to the most glittering stars?   But at least we were at a New Year’s Eve party with the director of the board of education and he said to us….

The psalmist says there is another way we may try to overcome our aloneness: money. “If only I had my cousin’s income, my cousin would have to stop treating me like a non-event.” (Would she?) “If I only my net worth were large I should then be recognized by those whose net worth is comparable.” (Don’t bet on it. And besides, what would this accomplish, since those who have greater net worth are every bit as lonely themselves?)   The psalmist tells us we shouldn’t even bother with this. “If riches increase, set not your heart on them.”   We shouldn’t waste a minute thinking that money — whether gained legally or illegally — will do it for us.

Then how is our bone-chilling, heart-icing aloneness overcome?   Those of low estate can’t do it for us; neither can those of high estate; neither can an increase in riches, since something as impersonal as money will never remedy an ache that is profoundly personal.  Then what can?

IV: — More profoundly, who can? The psalmist tells us himself.

Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that

power belongs to God; and that to thee, O Lord,

belongs steadfast love.

“Once God has spoken; twice have I heard….”    It’s a semitism, a Hebrew way of speaking: “Once…twice.” The psalmist means, “Every time I hear God speaking, it echoes in my heart as well. I hear God speak, and I also hear the echo. God’s utterance is so telling, so penetrating, that I seem to hear it twice as often as he utters it — and he never stops uttering it!   Since God speaks his truth all the time, his truth is constantly dinned into me.” To hear God speak, and then to hear the echo as well, is to be inundated.  The psalmist began his sober psalm by crying, “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.”   Now he knows that he is saved by saturation, for he is saturated with God’s steadfast love for him.

Steadfast love. The two English words regularly translate one Hebrew word, HESED.  HESED is the word the Hebrew bible uses constantly in connection with God’s covenant. God’s covenant is his promise, his pledge that he who is mercy will ever show mercy. Our sin can certainly activate his mercy, but our sin can never terminate his mercy.  He will never forsake us because disgusted at us; he will never fail us because handcuffed before us.  God’s covenant is his pledge, his promise, that our fitful obedience to him will never diminish his faithfulness to us.  To say that steadfast love is the substance of God’s covenant is to say that our disgrace will not curdle his grace.  Angry as he may become at us, and anguished as well, he will not abandon us.

We must note how the psalmist reminds us that steadfast love and power alike belong to God. Power devoid of love would be destructive tyranny; steadfast love devoid of power would be weak and ineffective.  But God’s power is always and only the power of steadfast love, while his steadfast love is always and everywhere effective.

One year ago, a few days after Christmas, I went through a very difficult period of three or four weeks.  My difficulty, I think, had to do with the accumulation of several things: delayed reaction to the stresses that had fallen on me the previous spring, the fatigue that every minister knows around Christmas, exhaustion from teaching my semester-long course in historical theology, publisher’s deadlines for the book, So Great A Cloud of Witnesses, as well as the worst ‘flu I had had in a long time overtaking me on New Year’s Eve. In addition there were one or two other matters whose details you will have to leave with me.  I became depressed and anxious in a way that mystified me in that my depression and anxiety seemed vastly greater than any of the factors that supposedly gave rise to them, even if all these factors came together at once. I was spiralling down, knew I was spiralling down, and couldn’t do anything to halt the plunge.  Maureen loved me as ardently as she had since I was 19.  But there was nothing she could do.  Helpless and perplexed in equal measure, she couldn’t do anything except wait. I was still going down. Because I had upset her now, I was guilt-ridden as well as depressed and anxious. Just when I felt the pit of despair opening up before me and felt myself unable to avoid falling into it; just when I felt so bad I couldn’t imagine feeling worse; just then, one Thursday evening at 7:30 while I was standing in the dining room, staring at the floor, I was engulfed in a tidal wave of God’s love. It wasn’t that I “realized” that God loved me; it wasn’t even that I “realized” this afresh.  “Realized” is much too cerebral, much too ideational, much too abstract. I didn’t realize anything. I was flooded. I knew felt myself immersed in a love so pure and substantial that it was almost ask if my distress had been swallowed up in a giant batch of pure white dough (except that the dough, so far from threatening me with suffocation, promised me life.) I was bathed in the love of him who is love as tangibly as I was bathed in a tub of warm water later that night.  Don’t reduce it to, “Oh, Victor finally had his thinking clarified about the nature of God.”         Victor’s thinking about God’s nature had been clear for decades.  It was simply the very thing that the psalmist speaks of in Psalm 62: power and steadfast love alike belong to God.  For this reason God’s steadfast love was, for me at that moment, nothing less than a power-surge. As I stood in the dining room of my home, startled at “the presence”, a presence that was power and love in equal measure, the despair began to evaporate and the pit close up and the guilt, depression and anxiety recede. I didn’t recover instantly, but I knew that I was going to recover; I knew that recovery was underway. It took several weeks for me to come back.  One thing brought me back: an oceanic love, as steadfast as it was effective.

I trust you haven’t regarded my story as spiritual exhibitionism.  I share it with you for two reasons.  One, perhaps my story will help a fellow-sufferer.  Two, I agree with the psalmist when he tells us that to be visited with God’s visitation is to be charged with bearing witness.  The psalmist addresses the congregation and cries, “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart [all of you] before him; God is a refuge for us.”   When he began his psalm the psalmist felt isolated: “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”   Now he is eager to speak to fellow-worshippers at church!   “Trust in him, O people.”    And he supplies the word of personal testimony; “God is a refuge for us.” He can tell the congregation, “God is a refuge for us, you and me both”, inasmuch as he has first found God to be a refuge for him.

V: — I want to conclude with a word about what I call the miracle of providence. As we are so alone that our soul waits for God in silence; as we not only wait for him but also wait upon him; as we do this he rewards our waiting upon him by bringing to us another human being who has also been waiting for God in silence. The result is that neither we nor that other silent waiter-upon-God ever waits alone in silence in quite the same way again.  Someone has been brought into our orbit; we have been brought into his or her orbit; not any person at all, not a chatty well-wisher, but a fellow-sufferer who has also been a fellow-waiter-upon-God-in-silence; this person is brought to us, then another, and perhaps yet another.  There is forged a fellowship of those who have found steadfast love to be powerful, found power to be the strength of steadfast love — and who have found each other through the miracle of providence.         They will never be alone in quite the same way again.

Just because our Lord Jesus Christ was God-forsaken in Gethsemane for our sake, no human being is ever God-forsaken now.  For this reason we can lend our voice to the psalmist’s, “Trust in him at all times, O people, pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

God is a refuge, even as he introduces us to others who, by his providence, embody that selfsame refuge for us.

                                                                                               Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                                               

January 1995

PSALM 73

I: — Every winter people injure themselves — some seriously and a few fatally — through slipping on ice. They are most likely to slip when they don’t see the ice and are unable to safeguard themselves in any way. The ice has been covered over by the thinnest layer of snow or by a discarded newspaper. Before they know it their feet are gone from underneath them, and they lie immobile, wondering if the pain in the elbow or shoulder or wrist betokens a broken bone. If they have struck the back of their head they may be beyond wondering anything, at least for a while. Having one’s feet slip unexpectedly is no small matter.

What happens with our feet around ice happens to our self, our total person, around life. We slip and fall; fall dangerously, fall painfully, even fall catastrophically. Having slipped we have to ascertain how much damage has been done to us and how long recovery will take.

The psalmist tells us he came within an eyelash of having his feet slip catastrophically — when? when envy invaded his heart.   “My steps had well nigh slipped.  For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

Envy is a sin which threatens us all and of which we are all ashamed. Nobody boasts of being envious. People do boast of their sin, to be sure, but not the sin of envy.  Some people (chiefly males) boast of their lust.  They think that advertising their lasciviousness exalts them as a red-blooded “stud”. Some people boast of their hair-trigger temper.         They think that advertising their rage exalts them as a no-nonsense type that doesn’t take any “guff” from anyone, someone to be feared. But no one boasts of her envy. Envy is always sly. Envy is always disguised. Envy is always denied outwardly, however much it consumes us inwardly.

Envy is subtle, isn’t it.  Have you ever noticed the extent to which envy is disguised as social justice? For years I have noticed that what is put forward as concern for the poor is frequently envy of the rich. What is put forward as the attempt at lifting up many is secretly the attempt at pulling down a few.

Needless to say, not even pulling down a few satisfies our envy, simply because envy can never be satisfied; the more envy is fed the more its satisfaction recedes.

Why are people envious? We envy inasmuch as we assume that anything anyone else has we too must have. Likely we never even wanted the thing that someone else has until we noticed that he has it.  Suddenly the fact that he has it and we don’t have it is intolerable.

We are envious for another reason.  We refuse to admit that there are people who genuinely have greater talent or intelligence or skill than we have.  We think that to acknowledge someone else as more talented or intelligent or able is to declare ourselves failures (when of course it is to declare no such thing).

While none of us needs any encouragement to envy we are incited nonetheless on all sides. Think of the advertising that is beamed into us every day.  So much advertising aims at fostering in us a desire for what someone else has. Did she not have it, or did we not know that she has it, we shouldn’t want it for ourselves. (I am not speaking here of genuine human need but rather of artificially induced want.) We are pressured from all directions to want what we don’t need, and pressured to want it simply because someone else has it.   The pressure is effective in that the pressure presses upon us the message that unless we have it too we shall remain sunk in inferiority. What we want we soon expect. When expectation is not fulfilled want is riddled with anger and resentment; want, anger and resentment blended together appear as envy.

For this reason the most tragic aspect of envy is the poison it injects into friendships. Envy swells in us concerning those people whom we consider equals.  No one of our social class envies Queen Elizabeth, even though she is the richest woman in the world.  Instead we envy our friend, our dear, dear friend, whose job pays him $15,000 per year more than we earn.  Suddenly he appears less dear. In fact he now displays character-defects which either he didn’t display before or we didn’t see before. Actually, of course, it is not the case that he has recently come to display them or we have come to see them.  It is the case that we have recently come to imagine them; imagine them and even project them. All the while we remain unaware of what is going on in our own head and heart.         For what is going on is this: as soon as we imagine character-defects in our friend it is plain that his good fortune has left us feeling belittled.  He never intended to belittle us; and in fact his $15,000 per year hasn’t belittled us. Nonetheless we are certain now that he is belittling us, as certain as we are that the sun rises in the east. Feeling ourselves belittled we stupidly think — yet nonetheless wickedly think — that we can restore ourselves to our proper size, our proper largeness, only by diminishing him.  Envy is always bent on leveling.  End of friendship.

Yet as surely as our envy poisons our friendship envy poisons us ourselves.   Since envy renders us forever uncontented it renders us unable to rejoice.  Envy renders us dejected. More to the point, since our envy of someone else who has what we lack causes us to think ourselves losers, envy finds us languishing in self-rejection. Worse yet, since envy renders us sour, the more other people try to love us out of our envy the more we curdle their every effort.

“My feet had almost stumbled”, cries the psalmist, “I nearly fractured both legs, plus spine and skull; I nearly rendered myself immobile and insane when I became envious of the prosperous, for I looked upon the prosperous as arrogant and wicked.” It may be that the prosperous are arrogant — at least some of them.  It may be that the prosperous are wicked — at least some of them. It may also be that the prosperous are no more arrogant or wicked than anyone else.  At this point the psalmist’s envy has rendered him ridiculous.  For the prosperous people, the psalmist says, “have no pangs”. The prosperous have no pangs? They don’t suffer? They aren’t as finite, frail and fragile as the non-prosperous?  Ridiculous. To be sure we like to think that the prosperous “have it made”.  We like to think that because they “have it made” nothing about them can ever be unmade.  They can never suffer misfortune of any kind.  Because they are protected against financial loss we assume they are impervious to human loss. Their lives are devoid of difficulty, every bit as trouble-free as we foolishly imagine them to be. “Always at ease”, the psalmist says of them, “they increase in riches.” They may be increasing in riches. But are they “always at ease”?  Think of the Kennedy family of U.S.A. fame. Corrupt?   The old man, Joseph Kennedy, made millions handling liquor during the era of prohibition. Was the family wicked? The extramarital affairs which sons John and Robert had, not to mention their simultaneous affair with Marilyn Monroe, scarcely describe them as virtuous. Then has the family had no pangs? Has the family been always at ease? Two sons assassinated, Ted Kennedy’s wife an alcoholic, a grandson who is a drug-abuser, another family-member charged with rape.

And even if, in another case, there is no moral failure attached to someone who is prosperous, it still isn’t true that the prosperous are pang-free. John Robarts, lawyer, former premier of Ontario, suffered a stroke which left him partially paralyzed, and in his despair he shot himself.

Envy blinds us. Insofar as we envy someone else we blind ourselves to that person’s suffering.  We assume that whatever it is about him that is enviable has rendered him invulnerable, pain-free, impervious to suffering, 100% affliction-proof. But of course the prosperity of the prosperous cannot protect them against the human condition.

Envy poisons; envy embitters; envy blinds.  It does even more; it renders us self-pitying, self-righteous snivellers. “All in vain have I kept my heart clean”, the psalmist whines in his envy, “I have kept my heart clean and I received nothing for it!”   The truth is, he hasn’t kept his heart clean.  He may have kept his hands clean; i.e., he hasn’t done anything wrong. But his heart? How can he pretend to have kept it clean when he envies those whose prosperity (he says) has filled them with despicable character-defects?  Insofar as he envies them he is plainly willing to become a despicable character himself as long as he gets rich at the same time.  He hasn’t kept his heart clean!         But he has rendered himself a self-pitying, self-righteous whiner.

It is little wonder that no one boasts of envy.  Who would brag that he has turned himself into a poisonous, embittered, blind, self-righteous whiner?  Not even the psalmist is going to boast.

II: — What happens to him next? In a rare moment of rationality and self-perception he realizes how grotesquely he has disfigured himself.  In the same rare moment of rationality and self-perception he realizes too how shabby he appears to his fellow-believers, his congregation. “I should be untrue to the generation of thy children”, he cries to God.  The New English Bible puts it most succinctly: “Had I let myself talk on in this fashion I should have betrayed the family of God”. Plainly, the light is dawning; finally the light is dawning.

But still he needs more than the dawn; he needs broad daylight in order to get himself straightened around.         Broad daylight floods him when he goes to church.  “I went into the sanctuary of God”, he tells us.  He worshipped. To worship is to adore someone infinitely greater than we.  To worship, therefore, is to have our sights raised above ourselves. To worship is to be oriented away from ourselves.  Just because we are as envy-prone as we are, as self-preoccupied as we are, we need to be re-oriented again and again, at least every seven days (the bare minimum).

Few spectacles delight me more than air-shows.  Aerobatics entrance me. The formation-flying of the Snow Birds or the Blue Angels is good, but I prefer the solo performances of the smaller, propeller-powered aircraft.  These small planes perform far tighter manoeuvres, and perform them much closer to the ground. Recently I saw an aerobatics display on television which included much film-footage of the pilot. The pilot had been photographed by a camera positioned at the front of the cockpit. As the plane rolled and twisted and flipped upside down (many of these manoeuvres were quite violent) I noticed that the pilot was looking for the ground every two seconds. The pilot was constantly re-orienting himself. Because his manoeuvres were so extreme and so sudden, he could easily lose his bearings; and because he was so close to the ground, he had no margin of error. He re-oriented himself — “Where’s the ground?” — at least every two seconds; otherwise he would crash.

In the course of everything that comes upon us, including that insane envy which all of us know but will not admit, we too roll and twist and flip upside down. The only way we can keep from crashing — “My feet had almost stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped” — is to re-orient ourselves constantly. And we re-orient ourselves constantly by looking for that groundedness which is God.  To re-acquaint ourselves with that groundedness which is God is to avoid the crash. Worship is essential for this; if not every two seconds then at least once every week.

As the psalmist goes to church, as he worships, he gets his bearings once more. As he gets his bearings once more that rare moment of rationality and self-perception which got him to church and got him his bearings asserts itself and extends itself and gradually dispels the envy and the spinoffs of envy which had so recently laid hold of him.         As all of this is dispelled, as he returns to his right mind, he can scarcely believe how absurd he had become and how seriously he had warped himself. “I was stupid and ignorant”, he cries to God, “I was like a beast toward thee.” “Not only was I asinine”, he tells us frankly, “I was even outrageously insensitive to God; and for the longest time I couldn’t even see it!” As his envy evaporates his self-perception returns.  He knows he has been on the edge of catastrophe himself; he has come within an eyelash of betraying his fellow-believers, and he has affronted God.

How thorough the psalmist’s re-orientation is is given by his exclamation, “Whom have I in heaven but thee?         And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.”  Martin Luther’s translation is priceless: “As long as I have thee, I wish for nothing else in heaven or on earth.”  As the psalmist’s life sinks more deeply into God’s life; as God’s life sinks more deeply into the psalmist’s, the vastness of God floods the psalmist again and dilutes his envy until it vanishes without trace. “As long as I have thee, I wish for nothing else in heaven or on earth.”

Someone might wish to say that the cure for envy is to want less.  Of course to want less is to do away with envy.         But to say this is as unhelpful as to say that the cure for sickness is to be without disease. The critical question, however, is, “How do we come to be without disease?” How do we come to want less? By repeating one hundred times per day, “I resolve to want less!”? Repeating this one hundred times per day will only remind us of all that we don’t have and leave us wanting more! We cease wanting more by forgetting the “more” that we don’t have. And we forget it as we become preoccupied with him who himself is “more”; so much more, in fact, that to be possessed of him is to see the world’s trifles as just that: trifles which feed our acquisitiveness and vanity but never satisfy them.

“God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever”, says the psalmist at the end of his 73rd tract.  One thousand years later another son of Israel, born in the city of Tarsus and soon to die in the city of Rome, wrote, “For me to live is Christ; and to die can only mean more of him, for ever”.

Psalm 73 is a study in the pathology of envy, as well as a declaration of deliverance from the fatal condition.         While we have allowed the psalmist to tell us much today, however, we are going to let someone else have the last word.         The writer of the book of Proverbs says, “Contentment is a feast without end.” (Prov. 15:15 Jewish Publication Society)

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                     

November 2002

Psalm 90*,  Genesis 33:27,  Romans 2:4,  Hebrews 6:5,  2 Corinthians 6:10,  1 Corinthians 15:58

I: — “I’ll take you upriver for salmon fishing in the new year”, said the church elder to me in my first congregation, “if we are spared to see the spring.” Whenever this man spoke of his plans he always added something like this. He had been a lumberjack, had seen mishaps and accidents and tragedies without number, and knew perfectly well that life is always uncertain; life can never be domesticated; life is always riddled with the unforeseen and the unforeseeable; life can take a right-angled veer at any moment, even as it can end without warning.

My generation of affluent suburbanites, however, has virtually no appreciation of this. We do not admit that life is riddled with risks and accidents and surprise. There are many reasons why my generation does not. In the first place my generation has grown up with the least physical danger and the best health-care the world has seen. The lumberjack may have been crushed by a log, but the white collar office worker is merely going to sustain a paper-cut. If the paper-cut infects, one visit to the family physician will fix it. In addition, no younger or middleaged person is going to die of pneumonia today; and whereas our foreparents died of something as treatable as appendicitis, today the inflamed appendix is removed.

In the second place our society removes (out of sight, out of mind) everyone who is not a paragon of health. As a result we don’t have so much as to look at anyone who is infirm in body or mind. The paralyzed go to Lambert Lodge, the deranged to the provincial hospital, the senile go to the nursing home. What’s left in our midst are all those whom accident and misfortune, even old age have left unmolested. Whereas our foreparents greeted friends of the deceased in the family living room, we leave it all to the undertaker who manages never to pronounce the words “dead” or “death”. No wonder my generation of affluent suburbanites regards life as endlessly rosy: as rosy as it is endless.

In the third place as affluent people we unconsciously assume that we can purchase anything we need. If I need (or merely want) a two-week holiday in Hawaii, I can have it. I may have to forego leather seats on my new car in order to get to Hawaii; but still, what I need or want I can get somehow.

Because there is so much that we can control today (unlike our foreparents) we assume there is nothing that we cannot control.

At least this is what we assume until — until “it” happens. Then we react as if something utterly alien, utterly ununderstandable has descended upon us and upon us alone.

I regularly go along to the funeral home to meet with a family whose 93 year old granny has died. More often than you think someone fumes, “Why did granny have to die? She was in good health!” Yes she was. The assumption here is that if granny had been in poor health then her death would have been all right. But granny was in good health, and had been downtown shopping only yesterday. It’s not fair, I am told next, not fair at all that granny died when she was in good health — even though she was 93. Is life ever ours?

We assume today that the ease we enjoy, fostered by our affluence, is an ease we have a right to. If it ever appears that our ease might evaporate, then we scramble and scheme to make sure that our “right” stays right. When it finally must be admitted that our scrambling and scheming cannot guarantee the ease which we think is ours by right, we wail that we have been victimized. Life isn’t what it is supposed to be: obstacle-free, accident-free, risk-free, anticipatable to the last detail, and of course endless.

Before the rise of modern medicine waves of disease plucked off people of all ages in a kind of chilling lottery: smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria — and further back, plague. Then we came to feel that all of this was behind humankind forever, the lottery having been put out of commission. It seemed, according to some people, that advances in public health had even advanced the human condition: we modern folk were advanced specimens of humanity. Then came AIDS. Suddenly no sensible person could believe that the human condition had advanced at all. In fact humankind can’t even complain of being victimized blindly by a bacterium (as was the case with tuberculosis); instead we must admit that the new affliction is self-inflicted. When I overhear people talking about AIDS their agitation and anger border on panic: they know that the disease is humanly self-bestowed, and they are afraid that their fellow human beings are going to bestow it on them.

And yet there is something deeper still in us. Deeper than our apprehension that danger lurks in life is the feeling of rootlessness that we cannot get rid of. In our innermost depths we are afraid not that this misfortune or that calamity might overtake us; in our innermost depths we feel that we are transients in life. We feel that however vast the cosmos there is no corner of it we can honestly call “home”. Deep down we know that we have no fixed address. It’s not that we fear something; rather there is nothing we can seize or do or make which will let us feel that our home is here. Myself, I am convinced that our society’s preoccupation with TV, mindless amusement, sport (any distraction will do) is one more way of trying not to come to terms with the human condition.

II: — The psalmist is wiser than this. In stead of trying to deny the human condition (fragility, vulnerability, transitoriness), only to have the denial break down anyway, he recognizes it and owns it. Life is fleeting; our plans do fragment; we can’t fashion something permanent and impregnable in which we can then take refuge. The psalmist owns all of this, and is able to own it, just because he looks to God eternal. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations; from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” “Before the mountains were brought forth, or even you had formed the earth and world, you are God.” The human condition doesn’t find its resolution in any creaturely entity (the earth and the world); it doesn’t find its resolution even in something which appears as old and stable and immoveable as the mountains. The human condition finds its resolution in God and only in God. We cannot alter the human condition, despite our efforts to do so and our self-deception at having done so. We can only look to him who has made us for himself and therefore is himself our only dwelling place.

I am moved every time I ponder the last public address of Moses. He has endured unspeakable frustration for decades in the wilderness. His people bickered, complained, fought, fell into superstition, and railed against him as they unravelled throughout the nerve-wracking sojourn in the wilderness. Now the promised land is in sight. To be sure, the promised land is God’s gift; it is meant for their blessing. But of course, like modern affluent suburbanites, they confuse the gift with the giver himself; they think that enjoyment of the gift is a substitute for intimacy with the giver. Moses tells them on the eve of his death that not only is their ultimate dwelling place not the wilderness (they were never tempted to think this); it isn’t even the promised land (they are tempted to think this). “The eternal God is your dwelling place”, says Moses, “and underneath are the everlasting arms”.

To say that God is eternal is to say that God is qualitatively different from his creation and any aspect of it. If God were merely quantitatively different then he would merely live longer than we do. We might think that if we want to live a long time ourselves we should get on board with him. But of course it is not the case that God lives longer. God is not subject to time at all. God is eternal. Herein is our blessing, for merely adding years to the life of any of us or all of us will not alter the human condition. To be sure, over the span of 180 million years carbon and sulphur, nitrogen and hydrogen will form oil. But 180 million years will do nothing for the human condition. In God, however, we have what no time-extension will ever give us. In him we have that dwelling place which we need and crave, in view of the human condition, but which we can articulate only feebly and give to ourselves not at all.

III: — Because what we need most urgently and crave most profoundly is found only in God, God urge us to “turn back”. “Turn back, you mortals”. It’s a summons to repent. The summons to repent is reinforced by the psalmist’s awareness that God himself “turns us back to dust”. God does not let us forget, ultimately, that we are finite, fragile creatures. We came from dust, and to dust we shall return. We are not superhuman; we are not gods; we are not immortal; we are “frail creatures of dust”, as the hymnwriter reminds us.

How fragile are we? How transitory are we? How quickly do we pass off the scene? Three times over the psalmist tell us. We are like a leaf floating on a stream; in thirty seconds the leaf has passed downstream out of sight. We are like a dream; as soon as the sleeper awakes and gets on with the day, the dream is forgotten. We are like grass; lush and green in the morning, but after one day’s heat brown and withered by nightfall. The psalmist doesn’t keep on reminding us of our short span on earth to depress us. He wants only to render us realistic about ourselves. We aren’t here for very long, and in whatever time we are here life is uncertain.

Then the psalmist reinforces God’s summons to us to turn back, repent, by reminding us that not only is life short and uncertain, judgement awaits us inasmuch as we are sinners who have provoked God’s anger. “We are consumed by your anger”, he cries to God on behalf of all of us, “we are overwhelmed by your wrath.” To say that we are consumed by God’s anger is to say that nothing about us is exempt. And “overwhelmed”? “Overwhelmed” translates a Hebrew expression with a rich background. The Hebrew word is used of an army which is facing disaster and knows it. Suddenly its strategies, its tactics, its proud record, its confidence: they all mean nothing now. An army facing annihilation has nothing to say and nothing to do.

The same Hebrew word, “overwhelmed”, is used of Joseph’s brothers in Egypt when Joseph discloses himself to them. They had envied him, mistreated him, sold him into slavery in Egypt, lied about him to their father. Then famine came upon them. They staggered off to Egypt knowing they had to wheedle grain out of Pharaoh’s highest-ranking civil servant or they were going to starve to death. They go to Egypt confident that they can smooth-talk their way into food. They are granted a meeting with Pharaoh’s highest-ranking civil servant. Just when they think they have won the day the civil servant quietly says to them, “Do you know who I am? I’m Joseph, your brother, the one you treated shabbily and contemptuously thought you had disposed of forever. You are looking at Joseph, the one you wrote off as dead. What do you say now, fellows?” They don’t say anything. Speechless. The game is over and they know it. “Overwhelmed”.

I trust that you are overwhelmed, as I am. If you and I are overwhelmed today then we are admitting that the time of glib superficiality is over. The time of trifling with the gospel is over. The time (whatever time God’s patience and mercy permit us); the time of hearing and heeding the gospel is upon us. Jesus begins his public ministry with the declaration that in him God’s effective rule has come upon the world. Following this declaration Jesus utters the first imperative of his public ministry: repent. He is only repeating the cry of his Father 1000 years earlier, “Turn back, you mortals”. Turn back in the sense of return to the one who can be your dwelling place just because he alone is this.

Our Lord’s word is reflected faithfully in the witnesses he has gathered around him. Peter says that God delays executing judgement upon us the overwhelmed precisely to make time for us to repent, to return to him from whom all humankind has departed. Paul speaks of the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience. Then he adds, “But don’t trade on God’s kindness and forbearance and patience; don’t presume upon it. Don’t you know it is meant to lead you to repentance?”

No wonder the psalmist asks God to “teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom”. “Teach us to number our days.” It means, “Startle us with the importance of our days, since we have so few and so many of them are already behind us. Grant us to see our days in the light of your eternal truth and purpose and mercy; and grant us henceforth to walk in your light.”

I am aware of how important it is for me to number my days; especially aware every time I bury someone younger than I. I have buried dozens of people who were no older than I. And therefore I am always aware that the sermon you are hearing from me now may be the last one you will ever hear from me. Then I must not waste so much as one of the twenty minutes you allow me to magnify God’s truth and purpose and mercy in order that you may turn, return, to him.

IV: — As the psalmist himself turns to God he finds that his heart soars and his heart sings. He exults three times over.

In the first place he finds himself satisfied morning by morning with God’s steadfast love, with the result that he will rejoice and be glad all his days. There is no substitute for one’s own experience of God, is there. Those who have “tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come”, in the words of the author of Hebrews, know with a conviction and an assurance that will never desert them. There is no substitute for our own experience of grace. The psalmist doesn’t say that believers like him are going to be rendered healthy and wealthy. He insists, rather, that every day God’s steadfast love soaks into them so thoroughly that they can taste it. Taste it even in the midst of the rigours of the human condition. Despite the rigours and rejections and dangers of their existence as apostles, Paul speaks of himself and his fellow-apostles as “having nothing, yet possessing everything; poor, yet making many rich; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

In the second place the psalmist, dwelling as he does in that dwelling place which is God, discerns manifestations of God’s own work and glory and power. The early church was aware of two especial manifestations of God’s work and glory and power. One is the raising of Jesus Christ from the dead. The other is the triumph of the gospel as Jesus Christ (whose gospel it is) quickens faith in men and women and enlarges their faith and fosters life-long love and obedience and adoration.

To have numbered our days and to have got a heart of wisdom is to have come to know that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and is therefore set forth for all the world to hear and heed; it is also to find joy in the triumph of the gospel as the life-giving Word of God penetrates even the most affluence-insulated suburbanite and leaves his neighbours perplexed.

In the third place the psalmist knows that God is going to prosper the work of the psalmist’s hands. To number our days is certainly to be aware that we don’t have many days; yet it is also to know that the few we do have will bear kingdom-fruit insofar as we are about the king’s business. While our days are few, the eternal God will render the kingdom-work of our hands eternally fruitful. Paul tells us that we are to abound in the work of the Lord, since in the Lord our work will never be in vain.

Our confidence in it all is rooted in the truth that the eternal God is our dwelling place. The human condition, after all, is unchangeable. Life is short, death is sure, the unforeseeable abounds. To wail about this is futile; to think, titanically, that we can get ourselves beyond this is foolish. We are creatures of dust whom God keeps turning back to dust precisely in order that we might get a heart of wisdom and return to him. For then his steadfast love will find us rejoicing ourselves and praising him all our days.

F I N I S

                                                                                            Rev. Dr. Victor A. Shepherd

2 June, 1991

Psalm 93

I: — “Never let anyone tell you about the good old days”, my 80-year old grandfather told me when I was 19, “they weren’t good.”   He knew whereof he spoke. My grandfather worked 40 years in the factory of a major Canadian automobile manufacturer, and worked both before and after the unionization of workers. He often told me what it was like to work in a factory in the days before worker organization. He never once told me of the pittance-wages in those far-off days.   He spoke instead of working conditions, such as the danger of having car engines, each weighing half a ton, passing overhead on conveyor-belts. Occasionally one fell off and crushed the man below working on the line.   A company official would snarl at the horrified men to mind their own business and keep working while the victim was shovelled out of the way, lest the line have to be shut down.  My grandfather spoke of the company’s policy of treating different workers with outrageous arbitrariness so as to keep all employees off-balance, anxious, thoroughly confused and powerless as well.

The “good old days.” I had a grade-8 teacher who fondled pubescent girls in the classroom.   To be sure, the teacher tried to be discreet about it.  He assumed that his stealth was undetected.  But of course we pubescent boys had noticed for a long time what he was up to. We sniggered about it at recess. One day a 13-year old girl in the class, upset at the teacher’s advances and humiliated as well at her public victimization, leapt out of her seat and ran to the principal’s office.  A few minutes later she was back in the room, crushed and in tears; the principal to whom she had fled for refuge had laughed at her story and dismissed her as frivolous.

I don’t think the old days were “good” old days.  Yes, I’m aware that there are 1.2 million abortions each year in the United States . I don’t think, however, that the swelling figure means that the human heart has suddenly taken a turn for the worse, even though I am dismayed at the ceaseless slaughter. I think, rather, that the abortion figures swell on account of medical technology.  In-and-out abortion appointments are now as quick and slick as routine dental appointments. More than two hundred years ago John Wesley was startled at the number of women he found aborting themselves in England, and startled again that so very often the women who did this were those he least expected to find doing it.

Of course parents are anxious when they contemplate the pitfalls that await a teenager whose carelessness or cowardice outstrips her wisdom. Yet when I was younger than a teenager I saw my parents haunted by a pitfall of a different sort: the polio of the 1950s.  People who had fallen prey to polio could readily be seen.  They hobbled among us or wheeled or “crutched” themselves, even as occasionally there was yet another horrible story of an iron lung.

No one is going to make light of AIDS, particularly when we hear of places like the nations of central Africa where children are raised in town after town by grandparents, parents everywhere having died on account of the disease. While we are thinking of disease, we should recall the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919; it killed millions more than World War I had so recently killed.  (The ’flu killed 20 million.)

“The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods have lifted up their pounding”, the psalmist cries in Psalm 93. Everywhere in scripture the flood is a symbol like other large bodies of unpredictable water: oceans, lakes, large rivers.  All of these large bodies of water symbolize heart-stopping threats to humankind. The threats can be natural disasters like earthquakes and epidemics.   The threats can be humanly engineered, like the savagery with which people war against each other.  The threats can be self-induced, as when people flirt with sin only to find that sin’s consequences sear indelibly.  The threats can arise from sources that most people can’t even comprehend, as when huge sums of capital are moved from Tokyo or New York or Hong Kong and chain reactions begin that leave some people fortuitously wealthy and others forever impoverished. The threats can also be the most private, personal matters that no one else will ever know of yet for all that are no less chilling for the person who dreads them, and dreads them for good reason.

I admit that some things are less threatening now than they used to be. Children are much less likely to die prematurely from childhood disease.  Workers are much better protected than they used to be.  At the same time, however, other matters are much more threatening. War now kills far more civilians than combatants.         Environmental disasters are far more lethal than they used to be.  Thanks to electronic wizardry propaganda can be disseminated much more widely and far more tellingly than it could heretofore.  In other words, while different “floods” “pound” in different eras, the psalmist’s cry is never out of date: “The floods have lifted up their voice, O Lord; the floods lift up their pounding.” Our Israelite foreparents in faith were acquainted with the world’s tumult.         The human condition is just that: the human condition.

II: — In the midst of it all an Israelite mysteriously gifted with an experience of God more intense than his experience of the world’s tumult; an Israelite mysteriously gifted with a vision of God more intimate than the spectacle of his people’s pain; an Israelite mysteriously gifted with a Spirit-intimacy more immediate than all the immediacies that clamour in him as surely as they clamour in everyone else; in the midst of it all an Israelite who knows he’s been kissed by God cries from his heart, “The Lord reigns; God reigns.”   The psalmist isn’t a human freak; he doesn’t live above the poundings without and the palpitations within that no one else can get above. And since he’s part of the community of God’s people he’s affected as much as anyone else when that community stumbles or sins or bleeds from self-inflicted wounds, or manages to disgrace itself yet again.  Nevertheless it has been vouchsafed to him to stand up and declare, “The Lord reigns! God reigns!” He shouts his declaration just because he’s been seized with a heart-seizure he could never deny and would never want to.  “The Lord reigns; he is robed with majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength.” With his heightened seeing, the psalmist sees God robed, robed splendidly. To be robed, in scripture, is to possess authority.  To be robed in majesty is to have one’s authority made luminous with royal splendour. God looms up before the psalmist as sovereign; not idly sovereign (Queen Elizabeth being a mere figurehead, all power vested in parliament) but actually sovereign; and all of this shot through with splendour.         To be brought before the One who is robed in majesty is to be drawn to his authority on account of its splendour and to submit to the splendour on account of its authority.

And yet the psalmist sees even more.  He sees God “girded with strength.”   To be girded is to have one’s legs unencumbered by one’s cloak. When ancient people “girded their loins” they reached down between their legs, drew up their cloak by the hem and tucked it into their belt.  People “girded” themselves when they were about to flee, fight or work. Because God has promised never to forsake us, he won’t flee from us.  Yet since he is girded he will both fight for us and work for us.  And since he is girded “with strength” he will fight and work for us victoriously.

Now the psalmist exults, “Thy throne is established from of old; thou art from everlasting.” At the same time the psalmist declares that the world is established. How can the world be “established” when the world is precisely what is being pounded relentlessly? How can the world be “established” when chaos threatens the world at every moment? The key to understanding the psalmist is his insistence that God’s throne is established “from of old.” God’s throne is established “from of old” whereas the world is really very recent. Because God’s throne is established “from of old” the relatively recent world can never sink all the way down to chaos.  To say “from of old” is a Hebraic way of saying “from the creation.” However much chaos may appear to threaten, creation can no more be undone, ultimately, than the Creator himself be undone.  The fact that God’s throne is established, and established from of old, will always guarantee that the world is established.  However turbulent the world, however evil successive generations may be, one generation’s evil won’t be piled on another generation’s evil until evil accumulates to the point where the world is nothing but evil. This can’t happen.

At the same time the psalmist is realistic.  While evil won’t accumulate until the world is nothing but evil (and therefore humanly uninhabitable), evil and treachery, turbulence and tumult continue to afflict the world.

In Psalm 93 the psalmist refers repeatedly to the “floods.”   Any large body of riotous water is a biblical symbol for massive threat. Ocean, river, lake, flood: they all refer to threat, threat from any quarter in life, threat that aims at engulfing life.

There are always threats from natural disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics. There are the threats that political leaders engineer: war, discrimination, harassment. There are threats that money-managers pose: how many people helplessly lost their savings when the head of Royal Trust invested hugely in useless vehicles and Royal Trust stock bottomed out?   And of course there are threats of a personal, private nature: crushing disappointment, shocking betrayal, powerlessness in the face of relentless disease and unstoppable death.

Robert Coles, the paediatric psychiatrist at Harvard who continues to wonder why so many clergy are foolishly infatuated with psychiatry while disdaining their clergy-work as spiritual helpers; Coles tells of a medical school classmate, now middle-aged like Coles himself, who found himself a patient in one of Boston’s major hospitals. The MD-patient was incurably ill (and knew himself incurably ill) but not near death at that moment. A hospital chaplain (clergyman) entered his room to see him and began asking him how he “felt” about the diagnosis of his disease, how he “felt” about its prognosis, how he planned to “handle” it all.  The sick physician (he was Roman Catholic) was annoyed at the chaplain’s aping a psychiatrist. He cut off the amateurish questioning by picking up his bedside bible, handing it the chaplain and fuming, “Read to me from it; read to me from anywhere at all.” Startled, the chaplain opened the bible anywhere at all.  Since the book of psalms is in the middle of the bible, any bible opened at random will more likely open at the psalms than anywhere else.  This time it fell open at Psalm 69: “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.” (Ps.69: 1-2)   All of us can be – are – faced with floods of any sort from any quarter at any time.

Yet the psalmist continues to cry in Psalm 93, “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty.” The psalmist knows that God’s throne is indeed established from of old.

III: — My own heart resonates with the psalmist’s. He lived 2500 or even 3000 years before I was born. Yet by the grace of God I am one with him in experience and conviction. Needless to say I’m not alone in this. There is no end of people who have read Psalm 93 only to exclaim, “It’s true! I know it’s true. The Lord reigns, clothed in majesty. His throne, everlasting, is never threatened by floods of any sort; and because he isn’t threatened by floods of any sort, neither am I.”  I have met scores of people whose deep-down conviction is just this. Many of them couldn’t articulate it in the words I’ve used.  But no matter. What counts is being possessed of the truth, regardless of whether the right words or no words are at one’s tongue-tip.  Useless, on the other hand, is being able to finesse religious vocabulary while enjoying nothing of that to which the words point.  The apostle Paul warns young Timothy about those who “hold the form of religion but deny the power of it.” (2. Tim. 3:5)  He reminds the congregation in Corinth that “the kingdom of God consists not in talk but in power.” (1 Cor. 4:20)   Please don’t think that you suffer from any disadvantage in not having my verbal dexterity or my theological vocabulary.  The people whom Paul regards as dangerous to Timothy and dangerous to the Christians in Corinth are precisely those who possess both verbal dexterity and a theological vocabulary. The psalmist didn’t cry out as he did because he was a clever wordsmith; he cried out as he did inasmuch as he had caught a vision of the immensity of God and the grandeur of God and the glory of God and the truth of God.  The psalmist cried out inasmuch as he found himself engulfed in the presence of God. But unless we are to be spectators merely overhearing the psalmist and envying his experience, we must come to be possessed of the same heart-surge ourselves.

How? It’s important for us to understand where the psalmist was when he was engulfed and overwhelmed. He was in the temple, at worship, moving through the same old exercises of the same old service as the same old speaker droned on – when it happened.  What happened?   There was stamped on him as never before what was profoundly beautiful about the place of worship: God’s holiness.  “Holiness is the beauty of your temple.”, he cried to God.

Have you ever asked yourself what is most beautiful about the sanctuary of Schomberg Presbyterian Church?         Some might say the deep-dyed carpet, others the highly polished ash pews, others still the overall harmony of all the features of the sanctuary. All of these are beautiful. Yet the profoundest beauty of this room is God’s holiness.         God’s holiness is God’s own Godness; God is utterly distinct from his creation, and not identified with any part of it or aspect of it. God’s holiness also means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency.  His love is free from sentimentality; his anger is free from ill temper; his judgement is free from arbitrariness; his patience is free from indifference; his sovereignty is free from tyranny.  God’s holiness also means that all the aspects of God’s character just mentioned are gathered up into a unity.  Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultra-violet is gathered up into what we call “light”, so every dimension of God’s character and God’s transcendence is gathered up into God’s holiness. And this is what seized the psalmist one Sunday at worship.  It happened when he was in church.         Isn’t that reason enough for us all to keep coming to church week by week?

IV: — Possessed now of that worship-induced experience of God that is stamped indelibly upon him, the psalmist exclaims, “Your decrees are very sure.”  He means he’s now convinced that God’s truth is unalterable.

We haven’t time this morning to explore what this means for every aspect of God’s truth. Nevertheless there is one aspect of God’s truth we should linger over.   We mentioned it when we heard the psalmist say that God is “girded with strength.” We saw at that time what it meant for God to be girded: he will always fight for us and work for us. At the same time, the apostles insist repeatedly that we, Christ’s people, must be girded ourselves. We too must “gird up our loins”; that is, we too must take up the struggle and the work to which God has appointed us.  Jesus tells us we must have “our loins girded and our lamps burning” (Luke 12:37 ): we must be alert and watchful and ready to do what he summons us to do at the moment of his summons. Peter tells us we are to “gird up our minds (1 Peter 1:13 ); there is an intellectual rigour, a tough-mindedness, that must accompany the conviction and experience of the heart.         Paul tells us we are to “gird our loins with truth” (Eph.6:14); whatever we do in the name of Jesus Christ and for his sake must always be done in truth and transparency and sincerity, never in duplicity or deception or phoniness.

How important is it to come to church and keep coming in expectation of the psalmist’s situation becoming ours?  It’s crucially important, not the least because until the psalmist’s situation becomes ours we shan’t have in our bloodstream the conviction that God reigns, despite the raging of the floods within and without; we shan’t know unarguably that the world is established and can never spiral all the way down to life-choking chaos. And not least, until the psalmist’s situation becomes ours we shan’t know that God is girded with strength, and that because he will always fight and work for us, unwearied work and unstinting struggle are also required of us.

On the eve of his greatest struggle and greatest work, for us, our Lord Jesus Christ girded himself with a towel, we are told. (John 13:4) It was a sign of his humility. Our humility is to reflect his – including that humility which found him at worship, in church on the Sabbath, says Luke, “as his custom was.” (Luke 4:16)   Our Lord knew that God’s holiness is the church sanctuary’s profoundest beauty. What seized the psalmist seized our Lord ever so much more intently.  May it seize you and me alike as we are at worship, in church today, and every Sunday too.
                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                      

September 2005

Psalm 112:6

I: — There is no rigidity like the rigidity of the self-righteous.   There is no closed-mindedness like the closed-mindedness of the holier-than-most. There is no inflexibility like the inflexibility of those who are right, obviously right, always right. Is this the sort of thing the psalmist was talking about when he wrote, “The righteous will never be moved”?   We know that rigid, intransigent, closed-minded people have always claimed such texts for themselves when eager to trumpet their rigidity as virtuous.

Only a few years ago when the obscenity of apartheid was still operative in South Africa , a baby was found abandoned in a South African city.   Much consternation arose over whether the baby was black, coloured, Asian or white. The consternation arose inasmuch as whether the child were black, coloured, Asian or white would determine forever where the child could live, what schools it could attend, what its social and financial prospects were, and of course, whom it could marry.  The white racists who upheld Apartheid were utterly inflexible.  They were right; they were righteous; and their rigidity was virtuous. (Apartheid, we need scarcely add, didn’t disappear because the self-righteous repented; it disappeared through its own top-heaviness, the impossibility of maintaining it in the face of world opinion and international economics and other such external pressures.)

We might as well add that the rigidity born of self-righteousness is commonly viewed (at least by those who cling to it) as strength, whereas in fact such rigidity is weakness related to fear, unmanageable fear.

II: — When the psalmist writes, “The righteous will never be moved”, he has in mind something entirely different from the rigidity of the self-righteous and the fearful. He has in mind, rather, the simple truth that the assaults upon life from without and the irruptions of life from within will never crumble or fragment God’s people. To be sure, developments can always jar and jerk God’s people, can always wound them and pain them. Still, such developments won’t ultimately pulverise them before God, annihilate them before God, turn them into nobodies lost to themselves and scattered before him. The psalmist’s word here is a word of promise,God’s promise: his people won’t be blown away before him.  It’s also a word of defiance, our defiance: we aren’t going to look upon ourselves as hapless, helpless victims whose run-over remains are all that’s left of what used to be that “self” whom we knew and cherished before we were “clobbered” as we had never been “clobbered” before.  The psalmist’s pronouncement is promise on God’s part and defiance on ours.

Both God’s promise and our defiance are much needed in life, because ever so much befalls us from without and rises up from within, ever so much that appears to fragment us and frequently disorients us.  In the course of my life I’ve been hospitalised several times in hospitals from the very large to the very small.  The smallest had only 19 beds and therefore a small nursing staff. It also happened to be where I was hospitalised longest (35 days) and therefore where I came to know the nursing staff best. The nurses from all three shifts used to come into my room on medical business, to be sure, but then linger frequently to speak with me on non-medical matters.  I was startled at the jolts these people had endured.  One nurse, whose husband had been burned to death in a house fire, was phoned at the nursing station each evening by her son who was fleeing the police. Her son was wanted for child molesting. Sitting beside her, overhearing half the telephone conversation, was another nurse whose husband was a police officer searching for the fellow.  A third nurse, born and raised in Germany , told me she had been in Berlin at the end of the war when Russian troops arrived in the city.  The Russian soldiers, she said in her awkwardly accented English, had “rapped” all the German young women they could get their hands on, “rapping” her as well. In addition she had had to watch her father tortured, her father being made to stand in waist-deep, ice-cold water for hours on end.  Just after I was transferred to a Toronto hospital another nurse’s husband was killed in an industrial explosion. All this in the nursing staff of a 19-bed hospital.

These women knew I was badly injured; yet they also knew I was preparing for the ministry. Setting aside professional protocol for the moment they would speak to me and then pause, with a look in their eyes that meant, “What can you say to us from your perspective and out of your resources? Have we been blown apart and are too numb to know it?  Do the secret or not-so-secret shards of our life mean we are in fact as maimed as we appear, that our future under God is as bleak as our past at the hands of the world?”  I trust I was wise enough to speak only briefly, and with whatever sensitivity I could muster at age 23.  Centuries earlier a wiser person than I had said, “The righteous will never be moved.”

I have found that the most telling aspect of life’s blows isn’t the pain; it’s the disorientation, the confusion that accompanies the pain. Disorientation and confusion are much more difficult to endure than pain.  What’s more, just as we all have a different pain threshold, so we all have a different disorientation threshold.  And therefore it’s cruel to say of someone, “What befell her shouldn’t have knocked her askew.  After all, I sustained a greater blow myself and I didn’t become unglued.” It’s always cruel to suggest that someone who doesn’t match us in some respect, in any respect, is therefore weak or silly or (worst of all) an inferior Christian.

Pronounced disorientation is often found where pain is only slight. And in artificial circumstances (such as the midway at the Canadian National Exhibition) disorientation can occur where there’s no pain at all.  At some point you must have put down your money and walked into one of those CNE adventures where the floor is tilted, the ceiling is tilted, and the walls don’t meet either the floor or the ceiling at right-angles. The room isn’t even moving, yet in a few seconds your tummy is upset and you are disoriented. If it weren’t for the posted signs indicating the way out, after a few minutes you wouldn’t be able to find your way out.  Situations occur in life where the trusted shapes and configurations in life (the “right” angles) can’t be found and nothing seems to fit and tummies are queasy and disorientation is undeniable. The situations that do this to people may appear quite modest to those of us who aren’t afflicted at this moment.  Still, it’s utterly unhelpful – and worse than unhelpful – to say to someone caught up in such a development, “Compared to the ‘clobbering’ some people endure you have merely been caressed.”

As often as I remind myself that however much we can anticipate developments in our head we can never anticipate them in our heart; however much we can reason about a development not yet upon us we can’t know how we are going to react; however often I remind myself of this I nonetheless find myself trying to imagine, for instance, what it’s like to be unemployed. What’s it like to find one’s family in financial jeopardy? to have huge tracts of time on one’s hands? to have so little to do as not even to distract oneself from the anxiety that nibbles and gnaws relentlessly? to live in a society that measures self-worth by achievement only to have nothing, in the area of gainful employment, to achieve?  What’s it like to be embarrassed every day, as when someone trying to be helpful cheerfully says, “Why don’t you and your wife come to Stratford with us for the evening?”, and you have to mumble, with head hung low, “We don’t have money for Shakespeare”?

Up to this point the upsets mentioned today are those that befall us. Every bit as jarring, perhaps even more distressing, are those we bring upon ourselves.  To take a “spill” born of sin is still a “spill”, as jarring and wounding as any accidental disruption.  Self-disgust arising from it is all the more nauseating as we admit that there’s no excuse for the “spill.”  Disorientation arising from it is all the more pronounced as we admit that there’s no reason for the “spill.”   No reason? I learned a long time ago never to ask people why they did what they have done, just because they don’t know why.  Kierkegaard, always profound, pithily remarks, “Anyone who claims to understand sin has plainly never experienced it.”

III: — Then whether we are violated from without or from within we need to hear again our ancient friend who has been where we are and knows that the righteous are never going to be moved.  We aren’t going to be scattered before God and reduced to nothing in ourselves regardless of how we feel or how we appear.

But who are these righteous who will never be moved?  Not the self-righteous, not those who presume upon a superiority anywhere in life, whether that superiority be real or imagined.  The righteous are simply those who are rooted in Jesus Christ. The righteous are rightly rooted in him in

that he is the right one in whom we are to be rooted. Our Lord was jarred and jolted too, disoriented as well in Gethsemane in a way that you and I can’t fully comprehend. Yet in his resurrection he has been established, set before us as the one in whom the topsy-turvy lives of his people are ultimately settled and secured. Even when the way our life unfolds appears to contradict this; even when we are left feeling that the psalmist’s pronouncement and our Lord’s Easter victory are alike so very remote from us as not to affect us; even here truth remains truth: the righteous, those rightly rooted in the righteous one himself, are never going to be moved.

The apostle Paul tells us of his assorted hardships: shipwrecks, beatings, slander, danger from exposure, hunger and thirst.  It all sounds dreadful, and it was. Yet in his second Corinthian letter he admits that something worse befell him in Asia , something so horrible he can’t describe it and can barely bring himself to mention it. He writes, “In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. We felt we had received the sentence of death.”   And the result? He tells us that this crushing episode reacquainted him with the fact that his own resources were utterly inadequate and he could only rely “on God who raises the dead.” (2 Cor. 1:8-9)

The question we want to put to the apostle now is, “But when you have been hammered into the ground so as to be crushed, what does it mean to rely on the God who raises the dead?” For the answer to our question we must turn up his letter to the congregation in Colosse, where he writes, “Your life is hid with Christ in God.”   (Col. 3:3) We must be sure to grasp the nuances of his conviction.   To rely on the God who raises the dead is to rely on the God who has raised his Son. In view of the fact that Jesus Christ has been raised and can no longer be victimised by death and by death’s anticipations (sickness, despair, accident, violation, mental collapse); in view of the fact that Jesus Christ has been raised beyond the reach of death and death’s forerunners, our real life, our true life, our inviolable life is hidden in Christ; and because it’s hidden in Christ, it’s known to God inasmuch as God knows his own Son and all who are included in the Son.

Our real life isn’t what we see; our real life isn’t what we’d like to believe about ourselves; our real life isn’t what we are feeling at this moment or at any moment; neither is it what others perceive us to be.  Our real life, rather, is our innermost identity, forged firmly by the grip with which Christ our Lord grips us, maintained inviolably in the strength of his grip on us, and preserved eternally in that all of this is now fixed in the heart of the God who raised his Son, never to abandon him. Who we are most profoundly is hidden in the heart of God; but not merely hidden in the heart of God, for from time-to-time we are permitted to see it for ourselves, and one day it will be displayed for all to see and understand. Our life is hid with Christ in God.

Martin Luther clung to this text as he clung to few others.  In fact it was his favourite.  So very turbulent was his life, so unremittingly was he assailed with misunderstanding, slander, betrayal, attempts on his life, that he clung to the truth that his real life was hid with Christ in God.  When he recovered the biblical truth of justification by faith he was denounced; when he unfolded the logic of the gospel and European Christendom convulsed, he wondered if he had acted rightly in causing such a disruption; when contemporaries like Erasmus, intellectually brilliant but spiritually shallow, laughed at abuses in the church and remained content with laughing, Luther clung to this one text like a lifeline: “Your life is hid with Christ in God.”   When erstwhile supporters deserted him and dark voices within him caused him to doubt himself; when his 14 year old daughter Magdalena died in his arms and 18 month old Elizabeth died in her cradle he could only hang on to his lifeline even if in his distress he could barely croak the words.

During World War II it was noted that pilot trainees rarely became airsick while navigator trainees often did.         The reason was this. The navigator was bent over a map only two feet in front of his face.  As turbulent air bounced the airplane the jostling kept changing the navigator’s perspective on the map and his focus on the map.  Because of a perspective and a focus that changed ceaselessly on account of turbulence, the navigator was dizzy and nauseated in no time.  The pilot, of course, was in the same airplane and buffeted by the same turbulence. But the pilot was always looking out toward the horizon.  Therefore the pilot’s perspective and focus were constant.  The fact that he was looking away from himself and his immediate environment, looking out toward something constant; this stabilised him.

The author of the book of Hebrews urges us to do as much.  We are to have “our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith.” (Heb. 12:2, J.B. Phillips)   The author of Hebrews urges us to have our eyes fixed on Jesus in the context of the photo-gallery of the great men and women of faith: Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Samson, David.  He exhibits the photo-gallery so that we can look at these giants from time-to-time and find encouragement in them.         But however often we may glance at them, we are not to fix our gaze on them. Since we are rooted in Christ it only makes sense to have “our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith.”  Since the righteous are rooted in him it only makes sense to have our eyes fixed on him in the midst of life’s explosions and irruptions.

The God who knows his own Son and knows all those included in him; this God Isaiah speaks of as “the rock of our refuge.” (Isaiah 17:10) The righteous are indeed “fastened to the rock which cannot move”; they are “grounded firm and deep in the Saviour’s love”.  This is why the righteous will never be moved.

                                 Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                             

December 2006

Psalm 119

“She’s a legalist, you know, a legalist!” What comes to mind when we hear someone described like this? Most likely we think of someone who is always found with a rulebook of some sort in her hand, which rulebook she peers into in order to handle developments old and new in her life, the rules looming larger for her than any human suffering or human complexity.

“What’s wrong with this?”, someone asks, “If a legalistic approach to life gets her through stresses and strains that would otherwise submerge her; if a legalistic approach helps her cope where she would otherwise collapse, isn’t it preferable to having her break down?” The argument isn’t without point: none of us wants to see someone break down.

“Furthermore”, our questioner continues, “what you call ‘legalism’ has kept many people on the ‘straight and narrow’ morally. Would it be preferable for someone to wander off the straight and narrow into moral swamps and quicksands?” The argument isn’t without point: none of us wants to see someone plunge herself into moral disaster.

Nonetheless, when scripture speaks against legalism scripture is correct: legalism ultimately shrivels our hearts and corrupts our spirits. The gospel repudiates legalism for several reasons. Most importantly, legalism means that our entire life is oriented to an “ism” instead of to Jesus Christ. In other words, if we are legalists we are “ism-ists” where we should be Christians, oriented to our Lord himself. In the second place, legalism is to be repudiated in that while it initially seems helpful to us, it always ends up making us disdainful of others. As soon as we measure our life against a rulebook we invariably come to regard as inferior those who don’t measure up, don’t measure up the way we do, or who even have a rulebook that differs from ours, a rulebook manifestly inferior to ours. In the third place, legalism falls short in that no rulebook covers all the situations and developments that life brings before us. More rules have to be invented to fill the gaps, and then more still, until the humanness of human existence is crushed by the weight of regulation upon regulation.

I: — And yet in all of this we must never confuse legalism with the law of God. Scripture condemns legalism; scripture just as surely upholds the law of God. Legalism is a denial of living faith in Jesus Christ; honouring the law of God is part and parcel of living faith in Jesus Christ.

Our foreparent in faith, the psalmist, doesn’t confuse the two. The psalmist never finds the law of God orienting him away from the heart-throb of God himself. He never finds the law of God rendering him snobbishly disdainful or fatally crushed. On the contrary, the psalmist finds the law of God life-giving; it yields blessing, riches, joy. So far from shrivelling our humanness, the law of God expands our humanness. Listen to him (or her) in Psalm 119: “I will delight in thy statutes…I love thy commandments…My soul is consumed with longing for thy ordinances.” For the psalmist, plainly, the law of God has nothing to do with legalism. Not surprisingly he exclaims (Psalm 19) that the law of God is “sweeter than honey”. Psalm 119 happens to be the longest chapter in the entire bible: 176 verses. It is a sustained paean of praise to God for his law.

The church today urgently needs to recover the conviction that the law of God is sweeter than honey. How are we going to do this? The psalmist himself gives us a clue when he writes, “I will run in the way of thy commandments when Thou enlargest my understanding”, and then writes two verses later, “Give me understanding that I may keep thy law and observe it with my whole heart.” It is only as we profoundly understand the law of God that we are going to find it sweeter than honey, and only as we find it sweeter than honey that we are going to delight in it.

Since we are Christians it is crucial that we understand how the law of God is related to Jesus Christ. To do this we need a brief lesson in theology. In reading through 1^st Corinthians (chapt.10) you must have noticed Paul saying that when the Israelites were in the wilderness they were sustained by Christ. Sustained by him? He wasn’t to be born for another 1200 years. Nonetheless, it’s the apostle’s conviction that what Jesus Christ is to God’s people after Christ’s appearance among us he was to God’s people before his appearance among us. The sixteenth century Protestant Reformers, reading Paul closely, underlined this truth. No one underlined it with heavier pencil than John Calvin. Calvin insisted tirelessly that Jesus Christ, the one and only Mediator, in his sin-bearing capacity and also in his disciple-making capacity was present to the Israelites as surely as he is present to you and me. Calvin insisted that Jesus Christ was present to Abraham, Deborah and the psalmist; present to our ancestors in faith under the economy of the Torah. When believing Israelites heard and heeded Torah (what we call the law of God), they were receiving the same Christ, the one Mediator, that Peter, James and John received.

Jesus Christ is given to Israel under the economy of the Torah. The Torah is the revelation of God, including God’s claim upon us. It all adds up to this: the law of God (so dear to the psalmist) is the call of Jesus Christ to us, calling us to be his disciples. He calls us to himself and soaks us in his pardoning mercy; he also seizes us and holds us fast in order that we might learn of him. Discipleship, after all, entails discipline. He disciples us, disciplines us, as he places his yoke upon us, all the while reminding us that his yoke is easy and his burden light. Yoke is a common Hebrew metaphor for obedience to the Torah. Jesus Christ insists that he is the Torah of God. In shouldering his yoke we bind ourselves to him to learn of him and obey him as surely as our Israelite foreparents bound themselves to the Torah; better, as surely as our Israelite foreparents bound themselves to the one who was given them under the economy of the Torah.

In other words, it ought not to surprise us that the psalmist finds delight and joy and satisfaction in the law of God. Isn’t this what we find in Jesus?

To honour the law of God is to become Christ’s disciple. To become his disciple is to have him shape our lives. Now to have Jesus Christ shape our lives (as surely as the law of God shaped the psalmist’s) is to avoid the shapelessness of a blob. A blob is certainly shapeless; it’s also useless and unattractive. Not to take Christ’s yoke upon us is to remain shapeless, a blob.

At the same time, if we happen to have a “flighty” personality then our shapelessness is like a gas. A gas has no shape of itself; it takes on the shape of its container. As soon as you change the shape of the container, the gas takes on a different shape. The same thing happens with people: lacking shape in themselves, they take on the shape of their environment.

Think of the developments which unfold before us every day: pressures, challenges, temptations, opportunities. As these unfold before us some people are inert blobs: they do nothing. Others, the flighty ones, react like gasses: they take on the shape of their environment. But we who belong to Jesus Christ are going to be neither shapeless nor environment-shaped. We are going to be shaped by the master himself. We have taken his yoke upon us. We have found his yoke to ease us, the weight of it no burden at all. As his disciples we know that to love him is to love the shape he gives our lives. To love the shape he gives us is simply to love that law which the psalmist loved 3000 years ago. Loving our Lord, we don’t want to be blobs or gasses. We want only to be those men and women in whose lives the shape of Christ’s life is recognizable just because in us it is being replicated.

The psalmist wrote, “I will run in the way of thy commandments when Thou enlargest my understanding.” Centuries later Jesus called out, “Come quickly and follow me now!” Centuries later still you and I are those whose understanding God has enlarged, even as we are those whom Christ has called to himself. Simply put, we know what the psalmist means when he extols the law of God in the single longest chapter of the entire bible; we know too why the law of God delights him like nothing else. After all, who delights us more than Jesus?

II: — We should look now at the shapely contours we acquire as disciples of Jesus. We could look at such aspects of our shapeliness, such aspects of the law of God, as the Ten Commandments. But this morning I think we should look at some less familiar contours that we are prone to overlook; for instance, our Lord’s oft-repeated command, “Take heart; be of good cheer; take courage!” It is a command, not a suggestion; a command, not a counsel. Many times in the written gospels Jesus says, “Take heart; be of good cheer!” Cheerfulness, courage, the affirmation of life in the midst of relentless deadliness — it’s part of the shape that our Lord wills for all his disciples.

To be sure we are never without eversomuch deadliness: disappointment, loss, grief, shock, and the worst form of deadliness, betrayal. Yet in the midst of it all Jesus says, “I am here; I am resurrection and life; I have triumphed already and will shortly display my triumph. So you take heart!”

Our Lord says this over and over throughout his public ministry. Plainly it’s a major aspect of the shape he intends to impart to his people. It’s a major dimension of the law of God. Jesus says it to a man he has pardoned. Only because we are sinners do we need to be pardoned. But to know ourselves sinners isn’t to wallow; it isn’t to languish; it isn’t perversely to try to make ourselves feel better by first making ourselves feel worse. To know ourselves sinners in the presence of Jesus Christ is to know ourselves pardoned. We honour him as and only as we take heart and rejoice in our pardon.

Our Lord speaks the same word to a desperate woman in a crowd. This woman lacks verbal sophistication and theological subtlety and social acceptability, yet she knows if she can only touch him, simply make contact with him, she will be helped.

Our Lord speaks the same word to a group of frightened disciples who stare at the storm surrounding them until they are near-paralyzed. He doesn’t tell terrified disciples, “It’s nothing.” He doesn’t tell them that things aren’t as bad as they appear. He doesn’t tell them to paste on an imitation cheerfulness in order to appear composed in public. He insists, rather, that because he is resurrection and life, the victorious one, they can take heart, and they must.

Another dimension to the law of God, another contour to the shape that Jesus Christ imparts to his people, is articulated this time by the apostle Paul: “Keep on taking your wife in holiness and honour, not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God.” (When did you last hear a sermon on this text, “Keep on taking your wife in holiness and honour, not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God”?) It isn’t a putdown of libido and vigorous sexual activity in marriage. As a matter of fact when Paul came upon some Christian couples in Corinth (Gentiles, be it noted, who had not yet been to school in Israel) who thought they’d be godlier people if they abstained from intercourse, he told them they were silly, misguided and courting disaster. His one concession to them (in a situation where he didn’t want to make any concession at all) was that they could refrain from intercourse while they prayed together as long as praying together didn’t take more than ten minutes.) When the apostle urges us to continue to take our spouse in holiness and honour he means that Christians are never permitted to regard their spouse as their tool or instrument or possession. Just because my wife is wife and not servant or employee or implement or robot I must continue to cherish her, court her, woo her, esteem her. I am never permitted to take for granted or exploit or presume upon the personhood of the one person who is legally bound to me. We must always keep in mind the Greek Gentile world that forms the context of Paul’s ministry. Even so fine a Greek philosopher as Aristotle had said that a slave (whom Paul regarded as a human being equal with any free person) was no more than a tool that had to be fed, while a woman was a bizarre creature half-way between an animal and a man. Christians are to be known by the way they continue to honour, esteem and cherish their spouse.

Another contour: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” It’s easy to weep with those who weep. Only the most hardened person is so inured to human distress that he would fail to weep with those who are weeping. But to rejoice with those who rejoice is a different matter. When someone suddenly rejoices we know that extraordinary good fortune has overtaken him. His “ship has come in”. A windfall has befallen him. Something unexpected has magnified his elation a hundred times. It’s difficult to rejoice with such a person just because it’s easy to envy him. We never envy the grief-stricken or the ill or the unfortunate, and therefore we find it easy to weep with them. But we are prone to envy the rejoicing, and therefore we find it difficult to rejoice with them. It takes grace to rejoice with those who rejoice. It takes grace to rejoice in their rejoicing. Yet since our Lord’s burden is light, since his yoke is easy, we are never without the grace to do just this.

Three thousand years ago the psalmist exclaimed, “I love thy law”. Of course he did. Not having heard of Jesus Christ, he was yet visited by our Lord under the economy of the Torah, God’s law. It was as fitting for him to love God’s law as it is fitting for you and me to love God’s son, since the son of God, Jesus Christ, is Torah incarnate. Three millennia ago the psalmist knew that the law of God is a yoke that fits well, a burden so light as to be no more burden than wings are a burden to a bird or fins a burden to a fish.

III: — There is one final point we must mention today: our Israelite foreparents in faith insisted that the law of God is the key that unlocks the door to freedom. The psalmist wrote, “I shall walk at liberty, for I have sought thy precepts.” Most people think that the law of God cramps freedom, curtails freedom. They think this, of course, because they think that the law of God has to do with legalism, when in fact the law of God has to do with the most intimate relationship to God himself.

Centuries ago some oafs in a mediaeval village ridiculed a rabbi for his people’s preoccupation with Torah. They likened Torah to a large body of water: cold, murky, unappealing. Whereupon the rabbi told them that Torah is indeed like water: Torah is to the Jew what water is to the fish. It’s the only place the fish can thrive. Does any fish feel better for being out of the water? Does a fish look happier when out of the water? Is a fish profoundly free when it’s “free” of the water? The law of God is the natural habitat of God’s people; it’s where God’s people thrive.

The world at large thinks freedom to be the opportunity of doing anything at all. This isn’t freedom; this is the leading edge of bondage. Freedom, rather, is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord with our true nature. Think of a car engine. A malicious person has put sugar in the car’s fuel tank. Now the engine is clogged, and it won’t run. As the gummy “goo”, the impediment, is removed the engine is freed to run; that is, it is freed to act in accord with its true nature, propel the car. If someone remarks, “But is the engine free to make popcorn?”, the obvious reply is, “Don’t be silly: it isn’t a car engine’s nature to make popcorn. An engine is intended to propel a car. And now it is free to do just that.”

When we come to discuss what it is for human beings to be free the first matter we must be clear on is, “What is our true nature? Since freedom is the removal of any impediment to our acting in accord with our true nature, what is that nature?” What is the impediment? Who removes it?

It is our true nature to be and remain a child of God by faith. The impediment is the arch-sin of unbelief. Jesus Christ removes it as he surges over us in his truth and quickens by his grace that faith within us that we must now exercise ourselves. One aspect of the faith we now exercise is the obedience we owe him. To speak of the obedience we owe him is to speak of the law of God. Is it unfreeing to obey? Is it more freeing to have one’s life overtaken by bondage? Would the fish be better, feel better, appear better if it were “unencumbered” by water?

Ancient rabbis used to say, “When Torah entered the world, freedom entered the world.” Our Hasidic Jewish friends, known for their long black coats and their black hats and their untrimmed earlocks and their women with kerchiefs on their head and their large families; our Hasidic friends dance every Sabbath night in their ecstasy at God’s giving the Torah.

Jesus Christ is Torah incarnate. We his people rejoice at the freedom he has given us to be his people, the freedom to act in accord with our true nature. We know that his claim upon our obedience, so far from being irksome, is lifegiving. If we ever doubt this all we need do is glance at the living death of those who disdain his claim. One sidelong glance and we can’t wait to exclaim once more with the psalmist,

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;

The ordinances of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

More are they to be desired than gold, even much fine gold;

sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.

(Psalm 19)

To know Jesus is to love him; to love him is to find his yoke easy and his burden light. It is to find obedience a privilege. It all adds up to something an ancient believer knew long before any of us were born: the law of God is sweeter than honey.

Victor Shepherd    

November 2002

Psalm 121

I: —  Mountains are beautiful: majestic, imposing, seemingly immoveable.  Therefore it’s easy to assume we know what the psalmist means when he cries, “I lift up my eyes to the hills.”  Actually, he doesn’t mean what we think he means, since mountains were ambivalent for the Israelite people: majestic and imposing to be sure, yet also a source of danger.  After all, outlaws and cutthroats hid in the mountains and swept down out of the hills to harm travellers.         The mountains themselves were treacherous for travellers, riddled as they were with gorges and precipices and wild animals.  We modern folk like to imagine mountains (indeed, all of nature) as relief from burnout and source of refreshment.  Our Israelite foreparents knew better; they knew that while the mountains seem attractive as a place of refreshment and help, they are also the place of grave threat. In Psalm 11 the psalmist is tempted to “flee like a bird to the mountains”, tempted to “get away from it all”, as we like to say. But the psalmist knows that not even the birds are safe in the mountains: food is exceedingly scarce among rocks, and predators abound.  For this reason as soon as the psalmist looks at the distant hills and asks, “From whence does my help come?” he answers, “My help comes from the Lord, from Yahweh.”   Ultimately help doesn’t come from the mountains, from nature; help, the profoundest help we need, comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth.

II: — Nevertheless this lesson isn’t learned quickly.  In an increasingly secularized age help is sought from every quarter except the Lord. Yet the places we look to for help are like the mountains: attractive, beckoning, with much about them that is genuinely good, yet also threatening and ultimately not helpful in the profoundest sense.

[1]         Think of culture. Our society looks to culture for help. There are immense riches here. If I were deprived of Mozart’s genius and Yitzakh Perlman’s violin and Renee Fleming’s voice; if I were deprived of E.J.Pratt’s poetry and Robertson Davies’ prose and the movie, Chariots of Fire (which I have seen eleven times) I should be unquestionably the poorer for it. Culture possesses genuine riches; it lends us a genuine good.

Yet culture, as the mountains were to the Israelite people, is double-edged, ambivalent. Culture transmits values. What values does it transmit? Certainly whatever it is that Chariots of Fire embodies; but also what the movie, Mortal Thoughts, embodies. Mortal Thoughts cost me $12 as well as more than a little disquiet.  Mortal Thoughts is about a woman who cuts her best friend’s husband’s throat with an Exacto knife – blood everywhere.  Sitting beside me in the movie theatre was a 10 year old boy, eyes wide open, taking it all in. How many such spectacles has he seen already, and how many more will he see, each impression cumulatively skewing his innermost control-centre?         What was the youngster unconsciously taking in about what it means to be a human being and how disputes are settled?   As blood-soaked violence sank into his unconscious mind he was less and less likely ever to understand consciously that gratuitous violence is addictive; it creates an appetite for ever more violent spectacles. Culture transmits values. What’s being transmitted?

In any case culture, good or bad, can never penetrate as deeply as the human heart needs to be penetrated; it can’t finally “keep” us in the sense in which the Lord our God is our keeper.

[2]         Much the same can be said about the state, about government.  The state, civil government, is God-ordained to restrain criminality, preserve order and ensure the common good.  It must never be belittled. History relentlessly attests what life is like where the common good isn’t ensured. Not surprisingly, many people assume that the state, government, will “keep” them.  But no state, however just, can “keep” any human being in the sense that the Lord our God is our keeper.

And in a fallen creation, of course, the state is always ambivalent, always double-edged. That which is meant for blessing (Romans 13) in fact curses millions (Revelation 13, where the state is the beast from the abyss, the monster that devours the people of God). It would be difficult to convince masses in the world right now that the state is their helper in any sense.

[3]         Then there are the rugged individualists, brimful of confidence, who argue that the individual’s psychological resources are sufficient. Make no mistake: the individual’s psychological resources are wonderful.  I marvel at what people have in them: intuition, coping-mechanisms, resilience, creativity.

But also hidden in everyone’s intrapsychic landscape are psychological booby-traps.   All of us have dark recesses in our psyche which startle us when we least expect it just because we never guessed (couldn’t guess) what lurks within us.

The psalmist, then, is correct.  While he is tempted to flee to the mountains and seek help there, he knows that the mountains are both beautiful and dangerous.  And in any case the mountains can’t provide the kind of help he most profoundly needs. As much has to be said of anything else we might think can profoundly help.

III: — Our help comes from the Lord. What kind of help? What do we need help with? help for? We aren’t so foolish (I trust) as to assume we are promised divine assistance for our pet projects, or worse, for our ambition, or worse still, for our naked avarice. God isn’t the rocket fuel which powers whatever we think will let us “get ahead”. Then what is the nature of the help we both need and crave?   Our question concerning the nature of the help we need is answered by the psalmist’s repeated use of “keep” and “keeper”. We need to be “kept”;i.e., preserved, safeguarded. At bottom we know we need one thing above all else: we need the identity which God has given us in Christ to be safeguarded, preserved, in the midst of everything which threatens it in life, as well as whatever may threaten it in death. We know we can’t avoid sickness, setback and suffering.  We know that no one is spared these.  What we want, deepest down, is this: what I am in Christ, the real “me”, even the “me” which is so profound that God alone sees and knows it — that this “me” will be safeguarded now so as to be kept forever. Paul tells the believers in Colosse that who they really are, their ultimate identity, is hid with Christ in God.  What we most profoundly need is this: that what is hid with Christ in God will also be kept with Christ in God, safeguarded, preserved, until that day when nothing will be able to assail it, crumble it, evaporate it.

I have long been intrigued by the answers different people give to the question, “Who tells you who you are?”         I think that this question is so very significant inasmuch as the answer to it will determine who we are.  Do my parents tell me who I am?   To some extent, but if they alone do then I have never grown up.  Does my academic achievement or my professional standing or my reputation tell me who I am? These can only give me the most artificial identity.  Do I tell myself who I am? This yields a most confusing identity, since the “I” which tells the “I” which is told is like trying to set a watch to a factory whistle while trying to set the whistle to the watch.  Who tells any of us who we are?   Who tells me who I am? Who makes me who I am? And after whoever, whatever, makes me who I am, who or what is going to “keep” me in the psalmist’s sense of “keep”?

IV: — The One who keeps me is the One who has kept Israel . He “made” Israel , that people ordained to live for the praise of his glory and the enlightening of the nations. Having fashioned such a people he has kept them.  When they were threatened with dissolution in Egypt ; when they were discouraged in the wilderness; when prophets were dismayed at the faithlessness of the people, still the holy One of Israel kept them.

The psalmist argues that since God has so manifestly, obviously kept Israel , the people, God can be trusted to keep every person who is individually a member of Israel . Because the God who kept Israel has promised to keep the church, so that not even the powers of death can prevail against it, he will surely keep us who are individually members of it.

From the formation of Israel to the birth of Jesus 1300 years elapsed.  Israel was kept. The day came when Israel was gathered up into the person of Israel ’s greater Son. Was he kept? Seemingly not.  Yet as he was raised from the dead and was made to live forever more he is kept — his people with him, and you and me with his people. He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. There will be no forgetful lapse or careless lapse on God’s part during which something from within me or something from without me might deprive me of my identity before God and my security in him.

V: — Against what has God promised to safeguard us, “keep” us? – against the sun and the moon, says the psalmist.         The sun shall not smite us by day nor the moon by night.  We laugh, even snicker, at this.  Who gets sunstroked today? And even if travellers in hot countries might get sunstroked from time to time, who ever got moonstroked?

We laugh too soon. You see, for our Hebrew foreparents the sun symbolized perils on life’s journey which overwhelmed them. To be “sunstroked”, metaphorically, was to be “done in” by developments which were part and parcel of the journey itself.  Don’t we speak today of being “burnt out”?  We too speak metaphorically.  When we come upon someone who is manifestly “burnt out” we don’t rush her to the hospital for a skin graft.  We mean that ordinary, day-to-day developments have become too much for her. Employment is an everyday aspect of life’s journey.  Having a job, having to work, isn’t extraordinary.  Yet work can leave people burnt out.  Parenting is part of life’s journey; there’s nothing unusual about it. Yet in some circumstances parenting would leave anyone beside himself.   (If ever you are tempted to think otherwise, come with me for a day in family court.) Having aged parents isn’t unusual. Still, the stress of dealing with elderly parents can unravel us.  All of these developments are normal, everyday aspects of the journey of life. Yet they can bring us down.

It is plain that when the psalmist insists that we are going to be “kept” he doesn’t mean that we are going to be cushioned.  Any Christian who expects to be cushioned should look more closely at the master himself. Was he cushioned? against anything? He was cushioned against nothing, yet ultimately kept amidst everything, for no development has left him devoid of his identity before his Father. What caused him to sweat so profusely in Gethsemane that the sweat poured off his face like blood from a forehead gash; what caused him to cry out, “Even my Father has abandoned me.” — none of it ultimately dissolved him.  On the contrary all of it was the occasion in which his Father “kept” him, safeguarded him, preserved him, even as he felt it not.

We aren’t cushioned; we are kept.  Our identity before God, our security in God; this is safeguarded regardless of day-to-day developments, however ordinary, that appear to overwhelm us on life’s journey. The sun shall not smite us by day.

Moonstroke is something else.  The ancient world believed that the moon gave off noxious powers, among which were diseases of all kinds.  Disease is rooted in micro-organisms which we can’t see.  Micro-organisms are tiny, yet insidious and dangerous.  Whereas to be “sunstroked” is to fall victim to what overwhelms us frontally, visibly, on our journey, to be “moonstroked” is to be submarined insidiously by what we don’t see, can’t foresee, and against which therefore we aren’t forearmed.

When I was studying in Scotland I preached one Sunday to an Anglican congregation, one of whose families invited the Shepherds home for lunch.  Our host and hostess were both physicians.  They were telling us of a clergyman who was transparent to the gospel, who had had inestimable influence upon them, and who had meant the world to them. At the height of his powers this clergyman had come down with encephalitis, was severely brain-damaged, and now babbled and slobbered and stumbled.  So overcome was my physician-host in recounting his sad tale that he stopped speaking. Feeling awkward at the silence I admitted my medical ignorance and asked him how his friend had come to have encephalitis.  My host turned to me and said slowly and sadly, “How does anyone get it?” He meant, “Isn’t it tragic that we can be contending triumphantly with developments in front of us (sunstroke won’t get us) when unbeknown to us something microscopic yet insidious can submarine us and reduce us, apparently, to a pitiable creature who babbles and slobbers and stumbles.” If my host had lived 3000 years ago he would have said, “My clergyman-friend appears moonstroked.”

Speaking of encephalitis, I was moved more than I can tell at reading the book, Awakenings, by Dr. Oliver Sacks. (I’ve corresponded several times with Oliver Sacks, neurologist, since as a pastor I have to minister to neurologically damaged people.) Dr. Sacks spent much of his working life with patients whose Parkinsonian symptoms were rooted in encephalitis.  Where others saw human wreckage so neurologically wrecked as to be subhuman, Oliver Sacks saw creatures of God whom God “kept” despite the hideous ravages of their disease.  In other words, even the people who gave greatest evidence of being moonstroked ultimately weren’t.

God won’t cushion me against encephalitis.  (He who didn’t cushion his Son against anything isn’t going to cushion me.) But he will keep me — ultimately — against sunstroke and moonstroke alike.  Who I am in Jesus Christ; that “me” which God alone sees; who I really am even though I can only glimpse it from time to time; this is what God will safeguard, keep, regardless of what may seem to have overwhelmed me frontally or submarined me insidiously.

VI: — If the nature of God’s safeguarding is to preserve us against sunstroke and moonstroke alike, what is the scope of God’s keeping?  The psalmist says that God can be trusted to keep our “going out and our coming in.” “Going out and coming in” is a rich Hebrew expression with three distinct meanings.

[1]         In the first place “going out and coming in” is a Hebrew way of expressing totality or entirety; a Hebrew way of saying everything.  To say that God will keep our going out and our coming in is to say that nothing which befalls us will ever undo God’s keeping.  Nothing will ever handcuff God so as to leave him unable to keep us. He who wasn’t handcuffed by the death of his Son isn’t going to be handcuffed now.

[2]         In the second place “going out and coming in” refers to the important ventures and efforts and undertakings of life.  To have these “kept” is to have our kingdom efforts rendered fruitful. In Psalm 126 the psalmist writes, “He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come in with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” To know that God will keep our going out and our coming in is to know that our worthwhile undertakings in life – into which we have poured ourselves – aren’t going to be fruitless finally.  We may have seen little fruit to date for the energy we have poured out and the sacrifices we have made and the prayers we have pleaded; nonetheless, it all isn’t finally going to dribble away. It’s going to be crowned.

[3]         In the third place “going out and coming in” refers to the early years and the sunset years of life, infancy and old age, when we are helpless. At the beginning of life and at the end we are kept.  The child who dies in infancy, even the still-born child (not to mention the aborted child) is kept inviolate before God, by God.  The most senile person in the nursing home whose senility has left her unrecognizable; this person too is kept inviolate before God as well.

Today my heart rejoices that the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps will keep my going out and my coming in.

From whence does my help come?  Not from the hills, from nature, however majestic nature might be. My help – yours too – comes from the One who kept Israel , kept Israel ’s greater Son, and will keep any one of us unto the day of our Lord’s glorious appearing.

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          January 2007

Psalm 139: 19-24

        Psalm 137:7-9            1^st Kings 18:36-40               Matthew 5:17-20

According to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the collect for the second Sunday in Advent (next week) informs us that concerning the “Holy Scriptures” we are to “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”

Digest the scriptures? Throughout my ministry many people have told me the bible gives them indigestion.         They maintain that much of the bible is unpalatable.  What they find unpalatable, indigestible, is the bloodshed and the carnage. But it isn’t only the bloodshed and the carnage; it’s also the apparent attitude lying behind the bloodshed. Not only does this person disembowel that person; the biblical figures do it with such enthusiasm and even appear to relish doing it.

When my sisters and I were very young my mother used to read us instalments of the Cinderella story.  One evening my sisters broke into tears as they learned of the nastiness of Cinderella’s stepmother.  If the Cinderella story upsets children, should we allow them, never mind encourage them, to read bible stories?

The all-time “wretched verse” that upsets so very many people is that verse in Psalm 137 which is directed against Israel ’s enemies: “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.”  Are we dealing here merely with the barbarism (so-called) of primitive people, or with the conscienceless savagery of the deranged?  In fact we are dealing with neither.  Our Israelite foreparents in faith were not deranged.  Neither were they simply spewing barbarism.

I: — Nonetheless, many people remain perplexed, not to say put off.  Take the book of Psalms, for instance.  The psalms were the hymnbook or prayer book of our Israelite ancestors. The psalms have always been the prayerbook of Christians.  The psalms are matchless. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing.”

And then there is what many people regard as the under side.  “The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.”  “Do not I hate them that hate thee, O Lord?  And do not I loathe them that rise up against thee?  I hate them with perfect hatred.  I count them my enemies.” And then the “cruncher” which I have already quoted:  “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones (i.e., of the Edomites) and dashes them against the rock.”

C.S. Lewis speaks of these latter verses as “the refinement of malice”; they express, he says, a hatred which is “festering, gloating, undisguised.” I have long admired Lewis and usually agree with him, but not this time.  I do not think that the verses I have quoted are a refinement of malice; I do not think they embody a festering, gloating, undisguised hatred. Here Lewis is wrong.

You see, the psalmist who wrote, “I hate them with perfect hatred”, also wrote in the next line, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me.…” Whatever he meant by the so-called black verse he didn’t mean what we modern westerners accuse him of meaning.

Moreover, the bible is perfectly clear that we are not to be hateful toward enemies. The book of Leviticus states unambiguously, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbour, lest you sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.  I AM THE LORD”. Animosity toward one’s fellows isn’t even permitted in Israel , let alone encouraged, let alone divinely sanctioned.  The book of Exodus informs us, “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him.  If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up.” Even the person who hates me I must help; I must never return hatred for hatred.

Let me say right here that I am upset when I hear people assuming that the newer testament is new inasmuch as it is sweet and condemns nastiness, while the older testament is old inasmuch as it is bitter and condones nastiness. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For this reason I try to refrain from speaking of the “old” testament. In modern English “old” suggests antiquated or obsolete.  That collection of books, Genesis through Malachi, is neither antiquated nor obsolete.   Let’s think instead of the one witness of scripture consisting of an older part and a newer part. The older testament simply does not permit us to visit wanton cruelty upon someone we don’t like, even when we know that that person intends to harm us.

Think of the book of Proverbs.  “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink….”  We must be kind even toward those who are personal enemies.  “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles – lest the Lord see it and be displeased….” Plainly there is to be no gloating over the misfortune of one’s enemies, no elation that someone we don’t like (because he doesn’t like us) finally “got it in the teeth”; no pleasure that someone who has made his bed will now have to lie in it.  Glee that someone at last got his comeuppance may be humanly understandable; nevertheless, the older testament insists that such glee is sin. As Job searches his own heart he insists that he has not rejoiced at the ruin of an enemy.

“Not so fast”, someone objects; “look at the prophet Jeremiah. Doesn’t Jeremiah pray that God will destroy his persecutors twice over?”  Yes he does. But what does Jeremiah mean by this in view of the fact that he prefaces his prayer with these words: “I have not pressed thee (i.e., God) to send evil, nor have I desired the day of disaster, thou knowest”?

We must be sure to note that in the older testament vengeance is forbidden the people of God. God everywhere forbids his people to exact revenge. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”   The text doesn’t mean that we can forget about seeking revenge because God will do it for us. It means rather that we are not to seek revenge inasmuch as we are never objective and will always turn tit-for-tat into a vendetta which worsens every day. It means that what is to befall someone who wounds us is to be left in God’s hands.  Not that God will exact revenge on our behalf and therefore we can leave the matter of retaliation with him; rather, we leave the matter with him so that nasty retaliation won’t occur at all.

What about King David? As a military commander representing his nation David behaved with the undeflectable resolve that General Eisenhower did on D-Day.  But no one has ever suggested that Eisenhower’s military prowess on behalf of the allied nations betokened personal cruelty.  When faced with personal enemies King David acted with uncommon generosity. Saul tried to kill David repeatedly. Twice David had opportunity to rid himself of this threat on his life; he spared Saul on both occasions. Absalom, David’s son, tried to kill his father, even going so far as recruiting a gang of cutthroats to help him. David took no action at all against Absalom, and in fact was heartbroken when Absalom suffered a fatal mishap. Yes, David behaved unconscionably with respect to Bathsheba and her husband.  David also knew he was wrong in this; so far from pretending that God sanctioned it, he knew he was judged for it. (And his life thereafter fell apart on account of it.)

Then what do the “black verses” of the older testament mean?  What appear to be dreadful threats and curses are not directed towards one’s enemies. What appear to be threats and curses in fact are prayers.  Prayers prayed fervently to God.  Prayers of trust in God. Prayers of confidence that God will act speedily.  They are prayers that God will vindicate his own name.  The older testament insists that vindictiveness is sin; at the same time it cries out to God to vindicate his name, his truth, his people.

          Vindictiveness is nasty retaliation rooted in a mean spirit.  Vindication is clearing someone’s name of the slander which surrounds it.  Vindictiveness is a mean-spirited desire for revenge. Vindication is public recognition that a good name has been spoken of falsely.  In the older testament what appears to us to be nasty vindictiveness is in fact fervent prayer that God will vindicate himself, his truth, his people.

What would you do if your child were expelled from school for thieving when you knew that your child had not stolen?  You would stop at nothing to have your child’s name cleared.  It’s not that you personally dislike the school principal or board of education director; there is no personal vindictiveness here. You simply want your child vindicated; you want your child’s name cleared. And if you were vehement in pursuing this, really vehement, no one would fault you for it.

For years my wife was a primary school teacher.  What would I do if parents circulated word that they didn’t want their children in my wife’s grade one class because she was promiscuous and they thought they shouldn’t entrust their youngsters to such a person? What would I do? I’d do whatever it took to clear my wife’s name and restore public confidence in her integrity and public trust in her suitability as a teacher.  And if I appeared vehement in doing this?  Would anyone expect me to appear placid in the face of such slander?

The black passages, so-called, in the older testament are the cries of God’s people pleading with God to rout evil; to rout evil so thoroughly that no doubt will remain that it has been routed.  It’s not that the psalmist doesn’t like children or takes fiendish pleasure in seeing them thrown on rocks.  The psalmist knows that vindictiveness is sin.         The psalmist, rather, is crying to God to vindicate himself as the God who resists evil and supports those victimized by it.  Right now, say the psalmist and other sensitive people from the older testament, God’s truth is falsified; God’s way is mocked; God’s people are set upon; God’s name is dragged through the mud.  In other words, evil seems to triumph; evil gloats; evil sneers; evil profits from evil and continues to work more evil.  Won’t God do something to clear his name and demonstrate his truth and protect his people? Then evil must be routed; every vestige of it.

Each Sunday at worship (if not every day) we pray, “Thy kingdom come.” Do we mean it?  If we genuinely want the kingdom of God to come fully, then we want the kingdom of evil to go utterly.  “Kingdom of God come fully” means “kingdom of evil go utterly.” But this is highly abstract. The Hebrew mind is never abstract. The Hebrew mind is always concrete. Where we say, “May the kingdom of evil go”, the Israelite says, “May the cocaine-dealer drop dead. Happy is the society whose cocaine-dealers drop dead.”   You don’t have any personal vindictiveness toward cocaine-dealers; you don’t even know any.  But you do want vindication of the rule of law; you do want a just society; you do want callous exploitation eliminated; you do want defenceless people protected.

When I pray, “Thy kingdom come”, I am asking God to deal with the wicked man who gets rich by fleecing the helpless, schizophrenic people who frequently come to see me.  I am asking God to deal so thoroughly with this man that he will never try to fleece defenceless people again.  This is precisely what the psalmist is doing in Psalm 139 when he cries to God, “Your enemies are my enemies; I hate those who hate you.  I hate them with perfect hatred.”   When Jeremiah prays that God will destroy his persecutors twice over, Jeremiah is not vindictive. He wants only that God will act so thoroughly, so unmistakably, that the whole world will know that God opposes persecution, God vindicates those who are persecuted, and God vindicates himself as the saviour of the victimized.

When next you read what appears to reflect a nasty spirit, read again with new understanding.

II: — What about the death penalty, especially the death penalty for moral offences? Should this strand of the bible be censored? I do not defend the death penalty, and have published an article opposing the death penalty.

Let me set you straight on one thing: Canada has not abolished the death penalty.  Canada has abolished the death penalty for first degree murder.  Canada has retained the death penalty for treason.  Did you know that? Canada has said two things: murder shouldn’t be punishable by death, treason should. Why Canada has made this distinction I shan’t discuss this morning.  My only point is that we shouldn’t consider Israel of old barbaric for classifying some offences as capital when we civilised creatures of modernity continue to do as much ourselves.

Before we fancy ourselves wonderfully enlightened compared to ancient Hebrews let me say something in passing.         When the criminal had to be punished in ancient Israel , it was decreed that he could not be punished in any way that degraded him. Right now the penalty for first degree murder, in Canada , is twenty-five years in prison, no parole; twenty-five years in jail, no hope of early release. Is this degrading or not? Have we made any advance on our Israelite forebears?

In ancient Israel property offences were not punishable by death.  No property crime was deemed significant enough to entail execution. But violation of family life was. Adultery, for instance. In Canada , adultery isn’t punishable at all, not even by a fine.  Doesn’t that tell you what we think of family life?

But keep your hands off my car.  My car is thirteen years old and has a market value of about $75.         If you steal it, you are going to jail.  And if you seduce my wife? No penalty at all. Tell me, which is a greater wound to me: theft of my car or alienation of my wife? What warps children more: loss of their dad’s vehicle or loss of their mother?

Question: Are property offences exceedingly serious?  Canada says yes, Israel said no. Are violations of family life exceedingly serious? Canada says no, Israel said yes. Is car theft more destructive humanly than adultery? Canada says yes, Israel said no. What do you think?

Let me repeat: I am not defending the death penalty.  But before we snicker at the ancient people of God because they exercised the death penalty here or there, we must understand that we differ from our ancestors only in what we deem valuable.

III: — Should the bible be censored? What about the incidents involving extermination, like Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal prophets? You know the story. Elijah, the prophet of God, confronts the prophets of Baal.  Baal was a fertility deity. Devotees of the fertility deity worshipped any and all reproductive forces.  The temples of Baal worship featured religious prostitution, male as well as female. You came to the church of Baal and worshiped the fertility deity by joining yourself to church-sponsored prostitutes of both genders.

The Israelite people assumed they could worship both God and Baal. They didn’t want to give up God, the living God, since he had delivered them from slavery.  But why not combine God and Baal?  Why not have one’s cake and eat it too?   Worship of God, worship of Baal, one-stop shopping, best of both worlds. Let’s have an inclusive church. Nobody excluded. God plus Baal.  Holy Communion plus hookers.  Truth plus superstition. Gospel plus greed. Why not have it all?

It still happens. While Jesus says we can’t be the servant of God and the servant of mammon, many preachers tell us we can. The banking scandals involving the Vatican can still be smelled around the world.  In the 1930s when Frankie Costello was the biggest mafia gangster in New York City he sat, by invitation, on the Advisory Board of The Salvation Army.  A prominent Canadian family has given millions to facilitate the worship of the God of Israel, when this money was made ruthlessly, illegally, even murderously throughout the prohibition era.  During the French Revolution the church was disestablished in France . Napoleon found he couldn’t control the masses. He told church authorities he would re-establish the church if they promised to keep the masses docile and subject to his tyranny.  Church authorities did just that.  Hermann Goering, head of Germany ’s Air Force in World War II and a Nazi party member (after the war he took the little white pill smuggled in to him rather than face execution) was married in a Lutheran church whose communion table was draped with the Swastika.

Is God honoured by all this?  Elijah said no. Elijah insisted that Israel desperately needed radical renewal of faith.  Elijah knew as well that radical renewal of faith entailed a radical break with Baal.

Let it never be said of me that I thirst for violence.  But may it always be said of me that I and Elijah are one with respect to this: the church desperately needs radical renewal of faith; and there can be radical renewal of faith only as there is a radical break with Baal.

Should the bible be censored?  You decide. For as long as I live I shall cherish what I have said today about the so-called sub-Christian passages in it.  In addition, I shall remember that Jesus my Lord was raised on the psalms – all of them – and died quoting them. I shall remember that Jesus maintained that his advent, his coming, meant not that the older testament had been abolished but that it had been fulfilled. Fulfilled, it remains the Word of God written.

And therefore I deem the Prayerbook Collect for Advent to be correct: concerning the Holy Scriptures we must “hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.”

                                                                                               Victor Shepherd                                 

30^th November 2008      

 Advent I        
Church of St.Bride, Anglican, Mississauga

Psalm 139

No one doubts the importance of knowledge. It’s important to know what a red traffic light means and what the poison label on a bottle means. Without such knowledge we cannot survive. It’s important to know whatever it is we are supposed to know to do our job. Without such knowledge we shall find ourselves without a livelihood. Everyone understands this. But what almost no one understands is that it is far more important, ultimately, to be known than it is to know. For our deepest-down identity and our innermost security it is far more important to be known than it is to know. Think of the child. A child grows up with an unassailable sense of who she is and an inner core of self-confidence not because she knows whatever it is that eight year-olds know; she grows up with self-confidence and security because she lives in a family where she is known. Her parents know her. Because they know her they cherish her; they do all manner of good to her. The child grows up without feeling neglected or abandoned or unwanted or useless. She grows up secure, resilient, confident, self-forgetfully helpful to others.

Unquestionably scripture says much about our knowing God. It even says that it is important for us to know God. But scripture says far more about God’s knowing us; it’s even more important that God knows us.   After all, to whatever extent I come to know God my knowledge of God will always be slight compared to God’s knowledge of me. And if my identity before God and my security in a turbulent, treacherous world depended on my knowledge of God, then so very much would be hanging by so slender a thread. What matters far more for me than my knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of me. The most significant truth concerning any of us is this: God knows us.

I: — In Psalm 139 the psalmist exults in God’s knowledge of him. “Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up…. Even before a word is on my tongue thou knowest it altogether.” The psalmist exults in God’s knowledge of him. And so he should.

We should too. You see, when the Bible says that God knows us it doesn’t mean that God is sniffing out negativities about us; it doesn’t mean that the cosmic “snoop” is spying on us. It means something entirely different: God prospers us, God protects us, God blesses us, God renders us useful servants. Listen to the prophet Nahum: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him”. When Nahum says that God knows those who look to him and trust him, he means that God protects and prospers and uses such people even when, especially when, troubles without number come upon them. Speaking through the prophet Hosea God says to the Israelite people, “It was I who knew you in the wilderness, it was I who knew you in the land of drought”. To say that God knew Israel in the wilderness is not to say that God became aware that they were in the wilderness, that he acquired information which he had previously lacked. “God knew them in the wilderness” means “God sustained them, encouraged them, nurtured them, prospered them when they were without resources themselves and the taunt of the nations”. God speaks to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you… I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations”. God’s knowing Jeremiah makes him a prophet. The apostle Paul, himself a son of Israel , says two things in his first Corinthian letter about God’s knowing us. One, because God knows us, we can love God; God’s knowing us frees us to love him. Two, because God knows us, one day we shall know God in a manner akin to God’s knowing us now; God’s knowing us frees us to know him. We should never shrink from God’s searching us and knowing us. We should welcome it and exult in it. God’s knowing us can only prosper us.

We human beings are enormously complex and complicated at the same time that we are exceedingly frail and fragile. Let’s look first at our complexity. Think, for instance, of our tendency to rationalize. Now when I say “rationalize” I don’t mean “make excuses”. We make excuses after we have done something, make excuses to appease our conscience, and make excuses fully conscious of what we are doing and why.

Freud helped us to see, however, that rationalization is something else, for rationalization is entirely unconscious. And so far from being excuse-making after the fact, rationalization occurs before the deed; it launches the deed, precipitates it. It’s easy to be aware of what’s going on when we make excuses, since excuse-making is conscious and follows what we have found to prick our conscience. But it’s impossible to be aware of what’s going on when we are rationalizing, because the unconscious process deactivates our conscience and pushes us to proceed. Since you and I are rationalizing every day, do we know ourselves? profoundly know ourselves? How much of ourselves can we know?

Not only are we complex, complicated creatures, we are frail, fragile creatures as well. A germ so small that it can be seen only with the strongest microscope can crumble the champion weightlifter. An accidental nick in Norman Bethune’s finger ended the surgeon’s life in China . Since life is so very transitory, I shall have an identity eternally, I shall be “me” eternally, only as I am known to be “me” by the eternal one himself — for his knowing me makes me; that is, confers identity, even as his knowing me preserves “me” and honours me and exalts me.

What’s more, we are complex and fragile at the same time. The person who always holds me spellbound in his discussion of the peculiar blend of human complexity and fragility is Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist whose work I read avidly. Everyone finds some kinds of neurological damage easy to understand: if someone has a screwdriver driven into his brain he doesn’t think as well or talk as well or walk as well as he used to. We readily understand that damage to different areas of the brain produces different kinds of impairment. But what about those stunningly bizarre mind-body interrelationships which Sacks describes? They defy understanding. One of Sacks’s patients displayed the jerky, convulsive, spastic movements typical of someone suffering from post-encephalitic parkinsonism. But when Sacks played music for her, he observed “the complete disappearance of all these obstructive-explosive phenomena and their replacement by an ease and flow of movement as Miss D., suddenly free from her automatisms, smilingly ‘conducted’ the music or rose and danced to it”.

Another woman, also neurologically damaged, had enormous difficulty walking alone. But if someone walked alongside her, without so much as touching her, she was able to walk perfectly. “When you walk with me”, she said to her walking-companion, “I feel in myself your own power of walking. I partake of the power and freedom you have. Without ever knowing it, you make me a great gift”.

Another patient, a man suffering from dementia (i.e., indisputably brain-damaged) was, said Sacks, “fluttery, restless, forever lost”, never at peace. The fellow could be “held” for a while by a mental challenge (e.g., a puzzle) but then he fell apart as soon as the mental challenge was taken away. He could also be “held” by contemplating art or music — or by taking part in the Roman Catholic service of the mass, after which he was at peace for a protracted period.

What is the precise relationship of mind to body? of mind and body to spirit? Nobody knows. We are dealing with uttermost complexity and fragility at the same time. Then what are we? Who are we? What is our end? God alone knows. But God knows. God knows us.

To say that God knows is to say much more than God understands or God is aware. To say that God knows us is to say that God has fashioned for us — the very wounded (Sacks’s patients) and the somewhat less wounded (you and me) — an identity which guarantees we shall not be overlooked or misplaced or set aside. To say that God knows us is to say that God will prosper us in whatever wilderness we find ourselves, even if the wilderness is going to feel like wilderness for as long as we are in it. To say that God knows is to say that while others may disdain those who are socially insignificant or intellectually ordinary or politically dismissable, God uses such people on behalf of that kingdom which cannot be shaken.

What is the psalmist’s attitude to this? Wonder. Amazement. Astonishment. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me” he cries; “it is high, I cannot attain it.” He means that he is grasped by this glorious truth without being able to fathom it fully. He means he is certain that God will ever prosper him even though right now he cannot conceive how.

II: — And then the psalmist exults in it all. “Just think”, he exclaims, “regardless of where I go, or think I might go, or try to go, I can never outstrip God’s knowledge of me”. As he revels in the God who enfolds him the psalmist asks two rhetorical questions: “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Then he jubilantly shouts the answer to his own question: “Nowhere. I can’t depart from God’s Spirit; I can’t flee from God’s presence. And isn’t it wonderful that I can’t.” The psalmist reflects on the geometry of grace: “If I ascend to heaven (up, God’s abode, where all is life and light and love); if I make my bed in Sheol (down, the abode of the dead, where all is dark and dismal); if I take the wings of the morning (a common Hebrew expression meaning the east); if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea (the sea symbolized many things in Israel, and here it symbolizes the west, since the Mediterranean Sea was always west of Palestine) – up, down, east, west — THOU ART THERE”. In other words, the living God who knows us (which is to say, the loving God who prospers us) is the sphere, the atmosphere, the environment in which my life unfolds.   The God who is the atmosphere of our entire life is none other than the God whose love is as wide as the outstretched arms of his Son, whose patience is attested by his centuries-long faithfulness to Israel , whose truth is as constant as the constancy of his promises to us even in the face of our inconstancy before him.

There would be little point in saying that God is love unless we knew how much God loves, to what extent he loves, and whether he loves undeflectably. Paul tells us in his Roman letter that God has so loved us as to withhold nothing in his self-outpouring. If God has withheld nothing, then he cannot love us any more than he loves us at this moment. He loves us right now with nothing of himself held back, nothing of himself retained for self-preservation in case his love is not requited.

Although the psalmist lived centuries before Calvary , he was aware of all of this by anticipation. In Psalm 139 he maintains that God’s hand leads him, and God’s right hand holds him. Think of it: we are held by God’s right hand. For Hebrew people the left hand symbolizes judgement while the right hand symbolizes mercy and strength. To be held by God’s right hand is to be clasped by a mercy whose grip on us will never relent. In other words, our security rests not in the strength of our grip on him (our faith), but rather in the strength of his grip on us. Because God’s right hand is strength and mercy in equal measure, his grip on us will never be brutal, even as his mercy will never be ineffectual.

Is it true? Does it ring true within us? And if it rings true now, would it continue to ring true if adversity rained down upon us? I must offer you the testimony of two men, both now dead, whose work and witness have meant more to me than I can say. The two men are Martin Buber and Emil Fackenheim. Both are Jews, and therefore both are acquainted not only with that adversity which is the human lot, but also with the extraordinary adversity visited upon Jewish people since they are the ones the world prefers to hate. In addition, both men lived through the adversity for Jews, the Shoah. Both men are aware that life is a life-long engagement with the Holy One of Israel, even in the most unholy circumstances. Buber’s work I have read. Fackenheim I have spoken with dozens of times.

In 1938 Fackenheim was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, a forced-labour camp. Not everyone in Sachsenhausen was Jewish; Gentiles who had opposed the Hitler regime or were suspect for any reason were there too. One such Gentile was the Rev. Ernst Tillich, nephew of the famous German theologian Paul Tillich (Uncle Paul had long since moved to the USA ). On Christmas eve Ernst Tillich seemed unusually depressed. Fackenheim asked him why. “It’s Christmas eve”, the young Lutheran minister said, “and Christmas eve is the biggest festivity in the Lutheran church-calendar. For days I have been thinking of what I should say in my Christmas eve sermon if I had a congregation. But I haven’t a congregation, and that’s why I am depressed”. “I’ll get you a congregation”, said Fackenheim, and off he went. He rounded up all the rabbinical students he could find and sat them down in front of Ernst Tillich. “Here we are, Ernst, on Christmas eve in Sachsenhausen. Now you tell us what you would tell a Lutheran congregation of the God whose strength and mercy operate at all times and in all places — including Sachsenhausen”. When the sermon had been delivered the peculiar congregation sat far into the night discussing it. In the providence of God the privilege of speaking with Fackenheim dozens of times has been one of the most extraordinary blessings of my life. For as often as I have spoken with him I have found him overwhelmingly authentic in his acquaintance with the right hand of that God whose presence cannot be fled.

III: — So overcome is the psalmist as he rejoices in God’s knowledge of him that he — does what? says what? “O that thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God… men who maliciously defy thee, who lift themselves up against thee for evil. Do I not hate them that hate thee? I hate them with perfect hatred.”

Before you turn off and accuse the psalmist of glorying in God’s mercy only to display a hardened heart himself, think; think back to what we have discussed here many times concerning the category of “enemies” in the psalms. Enemies, at bottom, are not those whom the psalmist doesn’t like or who do not like him. Enemies, at bottom, are those who oppose God. Enemies are those who endeavour to thwart God and work evil. “I hate them with perfect hatred” is the psalmist’s way of saying, “Just as you are uncompromisingly opposed to evil, O God, I am uncompromisingly opposed too. The people who wound you as they disdain your way and truth and mercy wound me too, for I share your pain”. “I hate them with perfect hatred” is the psalmist’s awkward way (to us Gentiles) of saying, “I am steadfastly loyal to you, O God, and I resist the workers of iniquity as surely as you resist them”. When he cries, “O that thou wouldst slay the wicked”, he is pleading with God to rout evil, dispel evil, end it. Is there any Spirit-quickened person who wants evil to flourish? The psalmist is not displaying a callous heart; he is displaying a sensitivity quickened by his intimate acquaintance with the Holy one who struggles with an unholy world.

And yet it is easy, entirely too easy, for you and me to recognize evil wherever it abounds “out there”, when all the while we are blind to more than a little evil “in here”. Did not Jesus himself insist it is easy to see the dust-speck in our neighbour’s eye while remaining unaware of the patio-plank in our own eye? Furthermore, in light of what I said earlier about rationalization, an unconscious mechanism which precipitates us toward sin, it is foolish for us to pretend that evil flourishes “out there” while there is no trace of it “in here”.

The psalmist was aware of it before we ever thought of it. Having stood at God’s side in God’s resistance to evil; having pleaded with God to rout evil and render impotent the workers of evil, the psalmist now wonders if he himself isn’t among those people he has asked God to deal with. And so he pleads, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting”.

When we ask God to know our hearts and know our thoughts we are not merely asking God to examine us and then tell us what the examination has turned up. We are pleading with him to correct us. Remember, for God to know us, according to the Hebrew bible, is for God to prosper us, help us, bless us; ultimately, for God to know us is for God to save us.   And therefore we can only pray that God will know us afresh — know us, prosper us, bless us, save us. For then we shall walk that way which is everlasting; that way, says Jesus, which leads to life just because it is life.

Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        July 2005

Psalm 150

I: — There are two kinds of people who have to be told endlessly how great they are: the pathetically insecure, and the insufferably arrogant. The insecure must be told how great they are lest they collapse. The arrogant must be told lest they turn nasty.

Is God like either of these? Is God either pathetically insecure or insufferably arrogant? After all, God insists that he be praised. As a mater of fact the command to praise God is the most frequently repeated command in all of scripture. Our more effusive Christian friends frequently interject, “Praise the Lord!”, and interject it often enough to embarrass us, but not so often as to embarrass God, apparently.

In the psalms we overhear the psalmist praising God again and again. The psalmist urges us to praise God. Indeed, the psalmist is so stuck on praising God that he urges whales and cattle to praise God. How can a cow praise God, when a cow doesn’t even know she’s a cow? If this weren’t enough, the psalmist appears to approach the ridiculous when he urges “fire and hail, snow and frost” to praise God. Can any sense be made of this?

If we are to make any sense of it we have to begin with the matter of enjoyment or delight. Let’s think for a minute about our attitude to anything we enjoy, anything at all. Someone asks,
“How do you like your new car?”
    “It’s the best car I have ever owned.”
“Have you seen Timothy Findley’s new book?”
    “It’s the profoundest novel I have ever read.”
“What do you think of Mats Sundin?”
    “He’s a wizard with the puck within 30 feet of the net.”

You get the picture: anything we enjoy we praise. Enjoyment overflows spontaneously into praise. Our delight in anyone or anything overflows naturally into praise.

What’s more, whatever we praise we praise not simply because we happen to like it; whatever we praise we praise believing that praise is fitting. We praise the work of Shakespeare or Mozart or Rembrandt just because we know that our praise is not misplaced; we aren’t mistakenly praising something that actually merits our rejection. We are convinced that praise is a fitting response, an appropriate response, the only correct response. We praise what we admire, and our admiration isn’t wasted, isn’t evidence of tastelessness or insensitivity.

Another aspect of praise: you must have noticed that the people who are unhappy, cranky, miserable, sour-puss spoilsports are invariably those who praise least. They find so little enjoyment in life, so little that delights them, so little they admire that they can’t praise, since praise is the natural spillover of enjoyment and delight and admiration. And so they grope and grumble, chronically sour and sarcastic. On the other hand. those who praise most are always large-hearted people, profoundly contented, generous in their appreciation. In fact large-hearted, generous people can find something genuinely worthy of praise anywhere. The beefsteak was as tough and stringy as a tennis racket? Ah, but meat like this always has the best flavour! The movie was boring? But wasn’t it heartwarming to see the elderly couple in front of us who held hands all through it as though they were courting? The Blue Jays lost 5 – 0? Yes, but what a performance by the Baltimore pitcher! Those who praise most (because they find most to praise) are invariably the most delighted and delightful people. Ready praise is always a sign of someone’s inner good health.

Another aspect of praise. What we praise ourselves we implicitly recommend; we urge others to taste, know, cherish — and therein come to praise themselves. When I tell you enthusiastically that Glenn Gould is the finest pianist I have heard I am urging you to listen to Gould and discover his musical genius yourself. You see, I just know that any person with an ounce of musicality will find Gould praiseworthy too. What is IMPOSSIBLE is to say to someone, “I read the most marvelous book last night and I trust that you will find it dreadful.” We cannot praise something ourselves without urging others to find it worthy too.

Now let’s add up all that we have said and think once more about the psalmist. The psalmist invites us to praise God inasmuch as the psalmist has first, himself, found such delight in God that his delight overflows spontaneously into praise; and inasmuch as the psalmist has come upon riches in God he expects us to find the same riches in God ourselves. What is impossible is for the psalmist to have found his life enlarged and his heart inflamed by that fire which breathes into us passion and purity and peace, to have found his mouth pouring forth praise for this — only to add that there is nothing here for us. Impossible! The command of God, the invitation of God, is, “0 taste and see that the Lord is good”. Impossible for the psalmist to say, “I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and you will surely find him as vile as battery acid”. Whatever we praise we commend to others.

To praise the work of Timothy Findley is to be literarily attuned. (Not terribly important.) To praise the stickhandling of Mats Sundin is to be athletically alert. (Even less important.) TO PRAISE GOD IS TO BE SPIRITUALLY AWAKE. Exceedingly important. To praise God is to indicate that we are awake. (You see, people who are awake know the difference between waking and sleeping, while sleepers don’t know the difference.) To praise God means that we have not forfeited the good which God presses upon us in his Son; indeed, so far from forfeiting God’s priceless gift we have seen our name on it and now cherish it and want to thank him for it.

There is one more aspect of praise, any sort of praise, that we should look at today. Someone else’s praise of what we have come to enjoy COMPLETES OUR ENJOYMENT. Remember, what we delight in and cherish we praise spontaneously. Next, what we praise we commend to others as worthy of praise. Lastly, when others find it worthy of praise themselves our delight in it is magnified. My delight in Itzhak Perlman’s violin is so much greater if someone sits with me and by evening’s end has discovered the Perlman treasure for herself.

For this reason the New Testament tells us of the results of apostolic endeavours. It doesn’t tell us simply that the gospel was preached here or there. It tells us as well that those who heard it and came to faith WERE ADDED TO THE NUMBER OF BELIEVERS. We are told not simply that the gospel was announced in Thessalonica, but that it was received there with conviction and joy. The Christian missioners who had come to praise God for what the New Testament calls the gospel’s “unsearchable riches”; their joy was made complete by hearers who now praised God for the selfsame riches.

If we have grasped anything of the logic of praise then we understand profoundly why the psalmist tirelessly urges us, invites us, to praise God.

II: – In the time that remains this afternoon I want us to look briefly at Psalm 150. In the Bible the psalms are arranged in five hooks. Each of the five books concludes with a psalm of praise. The last book concludes with the 150th psalm, and it is surely the most unrestrained exclamation in all of scripture.

We are going to look at Psalm 150 under four headings: the “where” of praise, the “why” of praise, the “how” of praise, the “who” of praise.

WHERE: “Praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty firmament.” The sanctuary is the temple in Jerusalem. We are to praise God in our place of public worship. To be sure, a few psalms are written for private use, but most psalms characteristically urge congregations to praise God. It is the gathered people of God that most fittingly offers up praise; the liturgy designed for common use is the vehicle of praise. Israel always knew that God wants a people, and the public praise of God demonstrates that God has a people.

Yet the psalmist does more than summon us to praise God, “us” being we earth-bound creatures. He insists as well that God be praised in the firmament; that is, in heaven. In other words, those whose earthly struggles are over praise God eternally. We in assorted Protestant churches of modernity have almost no grasp of a truth which mediaeval and early-day Christians had in their bloodstream; namely, the church consists not only of those who trust Jesus Christ for righteousness and wisdom now, but also of all who have died in the faith and are eternally alive before God. As of this moment the church consists of you and me and all fellow-believers, plus Martin Luther, an unnamed Chinese peasant, Thomas Aquinas, a Roman soldier from the army that occupied Britain, Mother Teresa, as well as the anonymous Japanese Christians who came to faith through the Jesuit missions and martyrdoms in the 17th century. The church consists of all these people now simply because all of these people are alive before God now. While we still see through a glass darkly, the departed don’t, and therefore their praise must be richer even than ours. It is these latter people who praise God in the firmament. Sanctuary plus firmament means that all God’s people, ancient, mediaeval and modern; those alive now and those alive eternally; all God’s people praise God together. So much for the “where” of praise.

WHY: We are to praise God because of his mighty deeds. His mighty deeds are what he has done and what he continues to do. Anyone who is familiar at all with the Christian story can recite God’s mighty deeds: the creation which came forth through his word, the deliverance of his people from the degradation of slavery, the raising up of prophets who call the people to that love and loyalty and life which they are always losing sight of, the provision of God’s own Son as a remedy for our depravity and disgrace, the bestowal of that Spirit who is nothing less than the life-giving breath of God himself, the calling and equipping of Christian leaders of any era who have smiled in the face of suffering, opposition, even death.

God’s mighty deeds are startling. As we recall them our minds are taken beyond God’s deeds to God himself. At this point we resonate with the psalmist who cries, “Praise God according to his exceeding greatness.” The exceeding greatness of God is who God is in himself, not merely what he has done.

It is as we know ourselves included in what God has done that we praise him, and then praise him still more ardently as we adore God himself. This is why we praise.

HOW: “Praise him with trumpet. lute and harp, timbrel and dance, strings and pipe, cymbals of assorted shapes and sounds.” Plainly we are to employ any and all means in our praise of God. The list of musical instruments mentioned in the text is by no means exhaustive. Still, it is helpful to look at those that are mentioned.

**The trumpet was sounded to prepare God’s people for conflict. (Didn’t Jesus say that the whole world is gripped by that evil one whom we must resist?)

**The lute supplied bass notes, the foundational throb of praise, as regular as the throb of a heartbeat.

**The harp — made famous by Israel’s best-loved king — the harp spoke peace to troubled hearts.

**The tambourine supplied the rhythm for dancing and always meant celebration and rejoicing.

**The pipe was used at funerals. (If we can’t praise God in the midst of death then we are ignorant of the mightiest of his mighty deeds.)

**Cymbals were used in Israel to express ecstasy.

How is God to be praised? By every means, in every mood, on every occasion.

WHO: Who is to praise God? Everyone is to praise God. Everyone should. Only those will, of course, who are awake, whose delight in God and gratitude to God pulsate and spill over into praise. Still, everyone should, and everyone may.

It is John, living in unspeakable hardship in exile on the island of Patmos, who cries, “And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all therein saying, ‘To

him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever.'”

Victor Shepherd          

May 2000