Perfect Hatred

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Psalm 139; John 2:13-22

September 30, 2012 • Portage First UMC

While I enjoy the freedom that comes with having a vehicle and being able to drive where I want, there are times I think it would easier to be without a vehicle. At least, maybe, it might be better for my soul, because there’s this phenomenon that happens to us—at least most of us—when we get behind the wheel of a car. We think we own the road and everyone else better watch out. For instance, have you noticed hows everyone else on the road is a bad driver compared to you? And do you find yourself talking to the other cars, even though you know they can’t hear you? A friend of mine, several years ago, was driving and found herself griping loudly about the driving of another person when she heard her young daughter asking, “Mommy, who are you talking to?” She smiled and said, “I’m just talking to the lady.” In the late 1980’s a term developed to describe our actions on the road—“Road Rage.” That term actually originated with a couple of television newscasters in Los Angeles after a series of shootings on the freeways in and around L. A. “Road Rage” is anger out of control, sparked because others aren’t driving the way we think they should.

But that’s not the only place we experience anger. We see it a lot among those who believe they’re not getting what they are entitled to. On an extreme level, we’ve seen that recently in the Middle East—in Egypt and surrounding countries as people have responded to a short film that supposedly mocks the prophet Mohammed. I’m not endorsing the film or anything like that, but was killing people, burning flags and storming embassies a rational response? This past summer, when we were in Egypt, we couldn’t help but notice a simmering anger just below the surface. High unemployment, young men with no jobs and little future, and a sense of religious entitlement—it is a tinder box just waiting for a spark. Anger has erupted in violence.

But it doesn’t always, does it? Sometimes it just becomes irritation or an anger that we push down and try to ignore. What sorts of things make you angry? For some, it’s as simple as bad manners, littering, loud noises, people who seek attention, disrespectful people, and even religion. But psychologists say anger generally stems from a lack of justice, a sense that we’ve had some injustice done to us. And on a deeper level, it often stems from a lack of forgiveness of others, or a lack of forgiveness toward ourselves. You don’t have to look too far to see a simmering anger in our culture as well; it’s no coincidence that “Angry Birds” is a top selling computer and mobile game. It speaks to something within us, something that senses injustice and unfairness and the desire to do something about it, even if it’s just flinging cartoon birds at cartoon pigs. And yet, for most of us, we’ve been brought up to think of anger as bad, as something we’re somehow supposed to avoid. Is there such a thing as good anger? And what does that have to do with prayer?

We’re wrapping up our series this morning on “Talking With God.” We’ve spent the last month exploring some of the prayers of the Bible as recorded in the psalms, and this was never meant to be an exhaustive series on “how you pray.” What I hope we’ve gotten along the way is some signposts, some perspectives that perhaps have pointed you toward a richer and deeper prayer life—prayer that is more honest, prayer that is more grateful, prayer that is fully exuberant, and prayer that is repentant. In some ways, we’re coming full circle this morning as we deal with angry prayer. Now, that may sound like an oxymoron. Angry prayer? Is such a thing possible?

The psalmists certainly believed it was. Throughout the psalms, we find brutally raw emotion, including anger and even hatred. Psalm 137 is one of those places. This was the psalm my preaching professor had us read out loud in class as training for the reading of Scripture, and we typically did what everyone does—we read the passage deadpan, with little emotion. And Dr. Mercer stopped us and said, “Are you even listening to what you’re reading? You’ve got to feel what these writers were feeling.” Psalm 137 is an exile psalm, written after Jerusalem has been destroyed by Babylon. It’s a psalm of lament, and it’s seething with anger. It’s a prayer that asks God to punish the Babylonians. Listen to how it ends: “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (137:8-9). You can’t read that and not feel the pain, the anger, the hatred. And it’s right there, in the Bible. Does that mean anger and even revenge are blessed, that they’re okay? If you take a psalm like that in isolation, you might say, “Yes, of course.” And some have. But what’s happening in Psalm 137 and the reason it was preserved is because it’s honest; it’s gut-level prayer. It’s not because God is telling us to go out and murder our enemies, to kill their babies. You have to take Scripture as a whole, and just two psalms over from this ugly psalm is one that is much-loved, though it is a prayer of anger as well, only from a different perspective.

Psalm 139, which we read this morning, is an “of David” psalm. That doesn’t necessarily mean David wrote this psalm. I grew up thinking David wrote all the psalms, but that isn’t true. Some psalms claim other authorship, and even the psalms that are “of David” could actually have been written by David, or in honor or David, or by someone who was writing in David’s name. With many of them, including this one, we simply don’t know. But whoever wrote this, and whatever situation it was written in, the psalmist spends the first eighteen verses celebrating his relationship with God. In some of the most beautiful language available, the psalmist reminds us that “knowing” God isn’t just a matter of memorizing a list of facts. Rather, “knowing” God is about having a relationship with God (cf. VanGemeren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, pg. 136). And so the psalmist celebrates: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar” (139:1-2). He recognizes God is present in every moment and every place of his life: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (139:7). Go to heaven—God is there. Go to the depths—God is there. East to west, as far as civilization exists—God is there. Even in the darkness of the night—God is there.

The psalmist is not trying to get away from God. He’s finding comfort in God’s ever-presence. Even before he was born, he says, God was there. “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (139:14-15). There is no reason to doubt your worth or your value to God, the psalmist says. You are beloved from before you were born. Methodists call that “prevenient grace.” We believe there is never a moment when you are outside of God’s sight. From before you were born, even before you recognized God as your creator and savior, God is pouring out his grace on you. God works in our life even before we are born, which is one reason we offer baptism to infants and children. It’s a recognition that God is working in this child’s life even before the child can respond. There does have to be a response, a claiming of the salvation Jesus offers, but it’s not baptism that saves us. It’s Jesus. Baptism is a sign, a symbol, of what this psalm promises: there is never a moment when we are out of God’s sight.

And that’s an important context, then, for what comes next in Psalm 139. Because of this relationship, because of this intimate knowing between the psalmist and God, he can feel confident praying the next few verses. Listen to these words again: “If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies” (139:19-22). Other translations, in verse 22, say he has perfect hatred for them. That’s the psalmist’s way of saying he’s not wavering; his hatred for these enemies is so intense, so deep, it cannot be improved upon (Kalas, Longing to Pray, pg. 104). We tend to push back at that. Aren’t we supposed to love everyone? Is this just Old Testament hyperbole? What would Jesus do? How would he respond? Wouldn’t he love them anyway?

When I was in college, I led a small group for a number of years, and in one of the studies we looked at Jesus clearing the Temple. I made the comment about Jesus reacting in anger, and Brent, another member of the group, took issue with that. “I don’t think Jesus ever got angry,” he said. And he was adamant. He might have even been angry at me for saying such a thing! And certainly that picture of Jesus doesn’t square with the Sunday School images of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” So what does the evidence say? John 2 is the story of the first cleansing of the Temple. Though scholars are divided on it, it seems there were two Temple cleansings—one near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (which John tells us about) and one during the last week of Jesus’ life (which the other Gospels record). In the story from John, Jesus comes from Galilee to Jerusalem for the Passover, and he is surprised by what he finds in the Temple Courts. To understand what’s going on here, you have to know a bit about the way the Temple was laid out. The place closest to the altar was reserved for Jewish men. A little further out was a place where Jewish women could worship and pray, and the farthest place out was the “Court of the Gentiles.” That was as close to the altar as God-fearing Gentiles (non-Jews) could get. This court was their place of prayer. God-fearers, by the way, were those who wanted to worship in the Temple but weren’t willing to go through the whole process of converting to Judaism, but there was a place they could worship. In the past, when Jesus would have come to Jerusalem as a child or a young man, the marketplace, where animals were sold for the sacrifices, was across the Kidron Valley on the side of the Mount of Olives. But at some point around the year 30 AD (according to historical records), the rulers of the Temple decided they could make more money if they moved it into the Temple Courts. And you obviously can’t put that in the place of Jewish worship, but this place of Gentile worship isn’t all that important. So they set up the marketplace in the place the Gentiles came to pray. There was no longer any quiet place for the God-fearers to worship (Card, The Parable of Joy, pg. 29).

That’s what Jesus sees when he comes into the Temple this day. And it angers him, not just because the place of worship has been taken away, but also because they are using the Temple to exploit the poor, to take advantage of those who have little. That’s why he singles out the dove sellers when he begins tearing things up. The dove was the sacrifice of the poor; it was, in fact, the sacrifice that was offered to “redeem” Jesus when he was a baby because his family was poor. Over on the Mount of Olives, a dove had cost about four cents. Here, in the Temple courts, it cost 75 cents. So not only are the Gentiles being pushed away from worship, so are the poor Jewish families. Jesus knows his family would have been excluded in that system. And that makes him angry. But it’s not an irrational “road rage” kind of anger. Jesus knows what he’s doing. He’s angry at the things people are doing that exploit others, that harm the vulnerable. He is angry about the things that make God his Father angry (cf. Card 31). That’s why he tears up the Temple. That’s why he runs out the moneychangers and the sellers of doves. Jesus hates what is happening here with perfect hatred.

And the same is true of the psalmist. The hatred he prays about, he says, is a hatred of those who hate God, who misuse God’s name, who rebel against God. In fact, we could go so far as to say “the psalmist sees no purpose in the existence of the wicked” (VanGemeren 839). But even then, he’s not against specific people, nor does he call out names. The psalmist hates what these folks do, the way they “revile God’s name” (Williams, Communicator’s Commentary: Psalms 73-150, pg. 487). You see, this prayer, and those like it, come out of a deep Hebrew conviction that God is just, that justice and integrity have been built into the very fabric of creation. “A God who is not just, and who doesn’t care about the mistreatment of ‘the poor and needy’ would not be worthy of worship” (Kalas 101). So when people do things that are unjust, when they do things that have no integrity, when we take advantage of those God is watching over, the psalmist says we are working against the God who made the world a place of justice. As people of prayer like the psalmist, we should be and must be angered when injustice rules the day. C. S. Lewis said if we can live with evil in the world and not be upset, something is wrong with us (qtd. in Kalas 101). So the call to angry prayer is a call to be angry about the things that make God angry.

Very often, it takes someone getting angry for anything to get done. It took William Wilberforce getting angry about the plight of the African slaves to move him toward abolition. And he worked all of his life to see the slave trade ended. He died just shortly after the final bill passed parliament to end it for good. In this country, that issue split the church down the middle because it was the northern Christians who believed slavery was a great evil that made God angry, and who worked against it. If you travel in the southern states, today still you’ll see Methodist churches that have in the cornerstone or over the door, “Methodist Episcopal Church South.” And yet, enough people believed it was wrong to finally bring an end to it. But, slavery goes on today in many parts of the world, most prominently in the form of sex trafficking. It takes people who get angry about the abuse of human beings, those who are made in God’s image, for any change to come about. Unfortunately, we get angry about the wrong things. This week, there was backlash against a Christian music artist who regularly stands up against the slave trade and seeks to raise money to end this evil. And yet, she was seen in a picture with the President, and those who disagree with or dislike him blasted her for being seen at such an event. They got angry, but they were more angry about the president than they were about people being sold into slavery. Which do you think angers God more? I love what this artist wrote: “An approximate 27 million [people] are enslaved. Many of them young, underage girls, who are sold for sex. I have personally met many victims and this is not just an international problem, but happens here in the United States. I will continue to fight for their freedom…When the President commits to help fight this evil, I'm not going to question his motives, I'm going to applaud him and say thank you, knowing that his decision may mean freedom for many…This has nothing to do with the election or endorsing any candidate. No matter who the President is, I will continue to ask the White House for help in bringing freedom. I'm just shining the light of Jesus the best way I know how” (Natalie Grant, Facebook post). Are we angry about the things, the injustices, that make God angry?

I believe hunger makes God angry. I believe it angers him that children go home to a place where there is no food. I believe it angers God that one billion people in the world today do not have access to clean drinking water, and that every day nearly 4,000 children die because of water-borne disease. More people die in Africa from water-borne disease than war. I believe it angers God when those who are rich abuse those who are not. I believe it angers God when the system punishes people who want to work or want to do the right thing or who want to try to make their lives better. I believe it makes God angry when we worship things other than God—money, celebrities (even so-called “Christian celebrities”), possessions, even our busy-ness or our schedules. In Disciple this year, we’re reading the prophets of the Old Testament, and over and over again we hear the prophets call the people to worship only God and not idols, not little-g gods. Idolatry is still very much alive, and we have to guard against it each and every day. When anything becomes more important than God, it’s an idol, and that happens to us sometimes even before we’re aware of it. I believe idolatry makes God angry.

And I can be angry about these or any number of other issues—but simply being angry doesn’t solve anything. I love how the psalmist ends this prayer. After expressing his anger, he prays some very profound words: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (139:23-24). Now he’s already prayed about how close he and God are, and yet at the end, he’s still asking God to search him, to know him, and to expose anything he might be thinking or doing that aren’t pleasing to God. He wants to not only be “perfect” in his hatred of the things God hates; he wants to be “perfect” in his response as well. It’s easy to think that because we hate something, God must hate it, too. As Ellsworth Kalas says, “It’s hard to imagine that God has poorer taste than we do” (104). But the psalmist recognizes how easy it is to ascribe our feelings to God, to expect God to hate the things we hate, rather than the other way around. He wants to respond the way God would want him to respond. So search me, God, and remove any “offensive” way that might be in me.

So back to that question of, “What would Jesus do?” We know what Jesus would do. It’s right there in John 2. Jesus did what he could to restore the place of prayer. John says he made a whip of cords, overturned the tables and ran all the livestock out of the Temple courts (2:15). He told those who were selling doves, “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (2:16). And John tells us the disciples remembered—maybe that day, maybe later—that the Messiah would be known as one who had “zeal” for the house of God (2:17). But it wasn’t zeal for the building; it was for those who were being wronged by what was happening there. Jesus responded, and I believe if we just pray angry words, we’ve only done part of what we’re called to do. After we’ve prayed to be sure our “zeal” is in line with God’s, our prayers must turn into action.

It’s what has motivated our teenagers in the past to be involved with Destiny Rescue, a ministry that helps rescue people from the slave trade. It’s this kind of prayer that led us to “Feed My Lambs.” Many of you know that ministry came out of Disciple Bible Study, when Lil Falk talked about the children in her classroom going hungry over the weekends. That’s something that makes God angry, and so we couldn’t just sit by. If it was in our power to do something, I believe we had to do it. And so we went to the school system and we were turned away. We were told it would never work. But this church doesn’t give up easily, and so we were given the opportunity to pilot this ministry, in partnership with the Northwest Indiana Food Bank, at Myers School. And when it worked, suddenly, the school system was interested. This year, Lil and others have done tremendous work and, as we announced last week, Feed My Lambs is now in every elementary school in Portage Township, and this church alone raised over $15,000 this year to help kids eat on the weekends. That’s what this kind of prayer can do; it can change the world, one kid at a time. It’s that conviction that people should not go hungry that has led us to collect food for the food pantry. We do that every month—next Sunday is the day, first Sunday of the month. But then, a couple of times a year, we do a big push called “Stepping Out to Stop Hunger” and we’re going to do that again at the end of October. We have people who work sorting food, serving the community—all because we have this conviction that God doesn’t desire anyone to go hungry, and we believe we can turn those prayers into action, to make a difference.

We saw the same thing this summer with our Vacation Bible School when we set a goal of raising $250 to provide clean water in Guatemala. By the end of the week, those kids had raised over $500, and by partnering with the Rotary Club, we were able to double that, and provide four times the clean water we set out to do. You see, providing clean drinking water to everyone in the world is not about resources. We can do it. The United Nations estimates it would cost $30 billion to provide clean drinking water for everyone on the planet. Now, that sounds like a huge amount and it is, but let me put it in perspective. The developed world, including you and me, spends $90 billion a year on bottled water when we already have safe water in our taps. Or let me put it this way: last year Americans spent $6 billion on Christmas decorations. We spend $12 billion a year on storage facilities to hold all the stuff that won’t fit in our houses. And we spent over $52 billion on Black Friday alone last year. Americans spent $11 million a minute from Black Friday to Christmas—which totals $470 billion. When we get angry that others go without what we take for granted, I think our priorities will change. This year, again, half of our Christmas Candlelight offering will go to provide clean water, to chip away at that $30 billion. It’s not a lack of resources that holds us back; it’s a lack of willpower.

We know from the Scriptures poverty makes God angry. Does it make us angry? Or do we make excuses and lump everyone into the same category of, “They just don’t want to try”? That’s not true. And it’s that holy anger that compels us to go to Red Bird Mission every year, to make a difference in the lives of at least one family. The first year we were there, we had a discussion about whether or not Red Bird was making a real difference. They’ve been there a long time and poverty still exists, but it’s a generational thing and a mindset that you’re combatting. Yes, they’re making a difference, but it’s a slow process. For us, we live in a community where over 50% of the children are on free or reduced lunches at school. When will that make us angry enough to do something about it?

And I think it makes God angry that the church, over 2,000 years of history, has failed to win the world. Paul says God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:4), but he counts on us to share that good news with others. Jesus’ last command to the church was to go into all the world and make disciples (Matthew 28:19), and that has been the mission of the church ever since. We “offer Jesus.” I believe it breaks God’s heart for people to reject him and for others to not even get to know him. When we will we get angry enough about people dying without Jesus for it to make us want to share our faith with others?

So, here’s your challenge for the week. I believe God puts specific passions within us; we can’t all do or respond to everything. So what makes you angry? For what issue or what thing has God put holy anger inside of you? This week, I want to ask you to pray about that every day, for seven days, and listen to where you sense God leading you. First of all, pray like the psalmist, asking God to search you and know you, to purify your thoughts, feelings and motives. Then, in the latter part of the week, ask God to give you a vision for what he wants you to do, how he calls you to respond. Write it down. Test it with some friends. How can we take this holy anger and use it to make a difference for God’s kingdom in this world? That’s the question Psalm 139 puts before us. It is “the perfect prayer for the angry soul” (Kalas 105). So talk with God this week, and see where God leads you. See where God leads all of us. Let’s pray.

The Most Difficult Words

The Sermon Study guide is here.

Psalm 51; 2 Samuel 12:1-7; Matthew 3:1-12

September 23, 2012 • Portage First UMC

It is a desolate and forbidding place. The final day we spent in Israel, we spent in the desert—the Judean wilderness, to be exact. And it’s hot there—very hot in late June. We started very early in the morning, and it was already well into the upper 80’s, and it only got hotter. We hiked to the top of a mountain called Masada, where a group of Jewish rebels made their last stand against Rome, and from there, we could see out across this dry and dusty region. But there wasn’t much to see, unless you enjoy looking at sand. Not much grows in the wilderness. Even the sea is dead there. One of our next stops was at a place called En Gedi, a place where the young David once hid out when King Saul was chasing him, hoping to catch and kill the young man who would be his replacement. But even there, it was hot and dry, and we had to walk quite a good, long distance to find a waterfall, a place for fresh water and a bit of shade. The desert is a foreboding place.

And so it’s hard for us to imagine someone living there, let alone someone who might walk around in that arid region clothed in camel’s hair and leather. Yet that’s exactly how Matthew describes John the Baptizer, Jesus’ cousin, and the desert is the place Matthew says John spent his ministry. Teaching people in the desert, baptizing them in the Jordan River just before it flows into the Dead Sea. But even if John was crazy enough to preach in this desert, why would anyone come hear him or see him? Yet, they did. Matthew says people from all over the area—from Jerusalem and the area surrounding the Jordan River, they came. John apparently gathered quite a crowd. And yet, unlike today where you have to preach a kind, soft, gentle message to gather a large crowd, John’s message was fiery. Matthew has preserved just the essence of it for us: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (3:2). To those whom the people looked up to, the Pharisees and the Saducees, he had stronger words: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (3:7-8). And yet, they came, and they listened to his call to repentance, and they confessed their sins and received baptism in the Jordan River. John’s was not a “popular” message, but somehow, it resonated deep within the hearts of the people of that time. Why do you suppose that was? What was it about this new preacher and new preaching that caught on, that caused people to brave the desert and to repent of their sins?

Well, it’s risky to guess the motives of people who lived so long ago, but perhaps it’s because John’s message wasn’t actually new, and his call to repentance wasn’t something he thought up. The call to confession and repentance was as old as the Jewish faith itself. It’s a call deeply embedded in the prayer life of the Hebrew people. During this month, we are looking at ways we talk with God, and to do that, we’re exploring this book of psalms in the Bible, the prayer book of the Bible. What we have in this book are 150 prayers, some of them written for personal use and others written for corporate use or for worship times. And if we could spend 150 weeks looking at each one of the psalms, we would learn something different about our prayer life in each one, which is why during the week, we’re encouraging you to read more of the psalms, using either the Scripture list in the bulletin or the free YouVersion app if you have it on a smartphone. The psalms teach us many aspects of prayer: that prayer can be honest, that prayer should be full of gratitude, and that prayer can be exuberant. But within these 150 psalms are a few psalms described by scholars as “penitential” psalms—they’re prayers of repentance, of confession, of trying to repair our broken relationship with God. There are seven of them, and you’ll read them all this week if you follow the readings—Psalms 6, 32, 38, 102, 130 and 143, but the most famous of the penitential psalms is the one we read this morning, Psalm 51.

Psalm 51 is one of the rare occasions where we know when it was written and for what situation. The heading in your Bibles probably says something like this: “A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” Well, we know when that happened. The story is recorded in 2 Samuel 11-12. It’s during the time David is king, and when he should be off leading his troops in battle, he’s back at the palace, walking along the rooftop. And from that rooftop, you might remember, he spies a woman bathing. Now, we could spend a lot of time wondering about the circumstances. Some have suggested she knew David was there. Others have said David knew she would be there—that kind of speculation is useless, because the point here is this: David saw Bathsheba, and lusted after her. Lust led to adultery, adultery to deception, and deception to murder (Williams, Communicator’s Commentary: Psalms 1-72, pg. 362). Bathsheba is pregnant, and in order to cover it up, David has her husband, an officer in his army, killed. Then, he takes Bathsheba, the grieving widow, as his wife, and he thinks no one will know. No one will be the wiser. And 2 Samuel 11 ends with these ominous words: “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Samuel 11:27).

2 Samuel 12 opens with God sending a prophet named Nathan to David, and Nathan tells him a story of two men. One man was wealthy, and had much livestock. The poor man had very little, only one small lamb, who was like a member of the family to him. A day came when the rich man had company, whom he needed to feed, but rather than taking from his own livestock, he took the poor man’s lamb, and fed it to his company. When David hears the story, he “burns with anger,” we’re told, and when we’re angry, we tend to say things we might wish we hadn’t later. David bursts out, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity” (12:5-6). And then comes the punchline. Nathan tells David, his king, “You are the man” (12:7). And in the rest of the chapter, Nathan explains to David how what he did with Bathsheba was similar to what the rich man in the story did. He sinned, not only against Bathsheba and her husband, but against God himself. He broke God’s law. He acted selfishly and he committed sin after sin. And it’s in that context we find David praying the words of Psalm 51.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about about David’s story is that it doesn’t shock us anymore. We’re not surprised by David’s actions. Every day on our television, we are exposed to similar and worse things—and that’s just on the news programs! We’ve done away with sin; we act as if there is no such thing anymore. Because if it looks so good, how could it be bad? Or at least that’s the thinking we have. I don’t know if you read “Garfield” or not; it’s about the only comic I read anymore. But this week, there was this great illustration of our thinking about sin. Garfield walks past the first sign, which says, “Keep Out.” And then he walks past the second sign that says, “Stay Away.” And when he gets to the third sign, which says, “Turn back,” Garfield concludes, “This has got to be something good!” We do the same thing. We read the Bible, and we hear the warnings. We know what sin looks like. We know those things we do that disrupt our relationship with God, that break down the communication, the fellowship we have with God. We know those things that cause hurt to others. Sin isn’t just the tabloid headlines (cf. Kalas, Longing to Pray, pg. 86); it’s the small ways, every day, we reject God’s teachings. Sin is to “miss the mark, the goal, the way” (Williams 363). It’s to vary from God’s standards. We walk by the sign that says, “Keep out.” And we jog by the sign that says, “Stay away.” And we run past the sign that says, “Turn back,” and before we know it, we’re in the midst of a mess, far away from God.

After our time in Israel this summer, eight of us went on to Egypt, and after a night and a day in the Sinai peninsula, we spent most of our time in the nation’s capital, Cairo. Cairo has somewhere around 9 million people in the city itself, with an additional 10 million in what we would call suburbs. And it’s a mess. It’s a dirty, crowded mess. After the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution, many inhabitants, in order (they say) to embarrass their government, began just throwing their trash in the streets, and in the canals, and just anywhere. And it’s all still there. People picnic in the middle of the garbage, which is hard to imagine, even though I’ve seen it, but then again, don’t we do the same thing in our spiritual life? We pile up garbage, stuff God never intended for us to carry around, to deal with all the time. That sin, this sin, that brokenness, that wounded ego, those angry words spoken in spite, that jealousy, lust, greed and so on. Unconfessed sin is the garbage of the soul, and it piles up, and unless we do something about it, it just stays there. We put on a “happy face” and we picnic among the garbage, but no matter how hard we pretend, everything is not okay (Kalas 84). That’s why these prayers, these penitential psalms, became so important to Israel. That’s why David, once he hears Nathan’s word, turns to prayer, turns to repentance. And out of his trial and his prayer, we can see four things we need to do in order to clean up the garbage sin has left in our lives.

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love” (51:1). The first movement in repentant prayer is to ask for mercy. David uses a series of images in the first couple of verses: “blot out my transgressions” refers to erasing a debt; it’s an accounting image. I owe a debt for what I did—could you please erase it? “Wash away all my iniquity” is an image from homemaking. The word refers to laundering clothes. Wash it out; get rid of the stains. Make it pure, like new. And “cleanse me from my sin” (51:1-2) refers to the process of removing imperfections from precious metals. Burn away the dross; make me precious, holy again. It’s the same request, just asked in three different ways, but what hope does David have that such a request will be answered or even granted? It’s because of who God is. He says that in the very first verse. It’s because of God’s “unfailing love.” That’s a word I’ve taught you before; it’s the word hesed, a very difficult word to translate, and so most of the time in your Bibles it will be rendered as “unfailing love” or “lovingkindness.” But the best translation is this: when the one who owes you nothing gives you everything. So because David trusts in God’s hesed, he trusts that his request for mercy will be granted.

With that belief firmly in his heart, David moves on to confess his sin. “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge” (51:4). Notice that there is no justification here, no questions about whether or not what he did was really a sin. No, David is here simply a soul deeply aware of his sin, of having offended God, and of being in deep need of God’s grace (cf. VanGemeren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, pg. 378). Now, David doesn’t mention his specific sin in what we have, perhaps because, as it was added to the collection of psalms, that detail was put in the heading rather than the text, so that this psalm could become a prayer for anyone in the midst of sin. But David does recognize that even though he has obviously sinned against a great number of people, ultimately his sin was against God. He broke relationship with God first and foremost. That doesn’t minimize or discount his sin against Bathsheba, her husband, or his country, but it does recognize that the first place we start in confessing our sins is the one who made us. The first thing addicts have to do in overcoming their addiction is to admit they have a problem and that they are powerless to overcome it on their own. So the 12-step programs all center around confession of the addiction and reliance upon a “higher power.” David does that here. God, I have sinned against you. I have a sin problem, and I cannot overcome by myself. Confession is not only good for the soul; it’s essential for our spiritual health.

It has been said that the most important words in the English language are, “I’m sorry.” And perhaps because of their importance, they are also the most difficult words to say. We are beyond reluctant to admit when we’re wrong, especially to the other person. We might, on some level, admit it to God, but we strongly dislike admitting to someone else that we are imperfect. You see, once we say those words to someone else, they have a measure of power over us. Will they accept our apology? Will they forgive us? When we say, “I’m sorry,” we place ourselves in the weaker place in the relationship, and we don’t want to do that. We’ve grown up believing the lie that was popularized in the book and movie Love Story: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s a lie. If we love someone, really love them, we ought to more willing to admit it when we have done a hurtful thing, when we have sinned against them (cf. Kalas 81-82). Confession includes speaking to God, and also to the other person. David, of course, can’t confess to Bathsheba’s husband, arguably the one most victimized by David’s sin, but he did have to make things right with the people, and with Bathsheba. “I know my transgressions,” David prays, “and my sin is always before me” (51:3). Confession—even if it means saying those most difficult words—is necessary for true, deep and lasting healing to take place.

David’s prayer doesn’t stop there, however. He continues: “Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean...create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” (51:7, 10). Once confession has been made, we can seek a new beginning, a fresh or “clean” start. David uses a very strong word for “cleanse” here, a word which literally means “un-sin me” (Williams 366). Remove every evidence of sin from my life, Lord, and then, in perhaps the most famous verse from this psalm, he asks for a “pure heart” (51:10). He asks God for a radical new beginning. We balk at such a request, because we’ve swallowed the belief that “well, nobody’s perfect, and everyone sins, so this is an impossible request.” Would it surprise you to know that the early Methodists preached a doctrine they called “entire sanctification” or “Christian perfection,” a state of life that, John Wesley believed, was possible. Not “sinlessness” or “perfection” in the sense that we usually think about—that we do everything perfectly and never again break any of God’s laws. Rather, those early Methodists testified of coming to a place in their lives where they loved God so much they only wanted to please him and had no desire to do anything else. Perfection in love, it also came to be known as. Can we imagine a heart so focused on God that love is all we see in that person? Usually, at least in my experience, the persons who come to that place, are the first ones to deny any sort of “arrival.” They typically are more aware of how far they are from what God desires than the rest of us are. My high school Sunday School teacher was so in love with Jesus she couldn’t help but ooze that love out on to everyone else. She was a grandmother, and yet she taught high school Sunday School every Sunday for over twenty-five years. Esther didn’t take summers off. She was there, in that non-air-conditioned church, telling high schoolers how much Jesus loved them. Esther would have told you she had far to go to be who God wanted her to be, but for me, in that class, she was a role model of what it meant to love like Jesus loved. There wasn’t a person I ever heard Esther talk bad about, and there wasn’t anyone she wouldn’t try to help. Is that what David pictured when he prayed for a “pure heart”? I don’t know, but I do know David longed for a new start, a “reboot” of sorts in his relationship with God, his creator. Seek a new beginning.

And, then, fourthly, be a witness to God’s mercy. David promises, “I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you” (51:13). A little further on, he prays, “Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise” (51:15). Now that he has been through the fire, now that he has repented, now that he has been restored, David can give witness to the goodness of God. He has a renewed spirit, willing to do God’s work, willing to share with others what he has been through. Credible witnesses are those who have been there, whose lives have been changed, redeemed from their own sin and struggle. Paul could preach about legalism because he had been a legalist (Williams 368-369). St. Augustine could talk about forgiveness from sexual sin because he had been there, had engaged in many forms of sexual sin. Chuck Colson could speak to prisoners about forgiveness and redemption because he had been a prisoner, had been caught in a nationwide scandal. Credible witnesses can speak and be heard because they have been redeemed from their own sin. So, that begs the question: what can you speak about? What do you have in your life you can use to encourage others? This is not about glorifying sin or making ourselves seem important or super-spiritual. If anything, it’s about making ourselves less so that Jesus, the great redeemer, can shine through. If we use our sin to build ourselves up, to build our own reputation or to make others feel small somehow, we’re not really giving witness to God and we’re not exhibiting a pure heart.

And that gets to the heart of what David prays at the end of this psalm. “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings” (51:16). What a shocking thing to pray! The whole Old Testament faith system was built around sacrifices. If you had sinned, if you had broken your commitment to God, there were intricate prescriptions to follow in order to make things right. You did this sin, you offered this sacrifice and that was what gave you forgiveness. And so the people followed that. It was easy. Do this, do that, get forgiven. Except that it was all too easy for it to become an empty ritual. Doing the sacrifice, David says, without a change of heart, without an affected life, was useless. Repentance was not about mechanical obedience. Repentance is about having our hearts broken because we have broken God’s heart. “My sacrifice,” David says, “is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (51:17). The sacrifices were never about earning forgiveness; they were about teaching the people that forgiveness costs us something. God doesn’t want your empty rituals. God wants your heart. And so to come to church just to “feel better” or get rid of guilt or to earn points with God—that’s not why we come here. We come to church, we come to worship to offer our whole selves, to say, “God, here I am, broken and yet forgiven, so use me as you can.” When we do that, then, when that’s why we gather, God will use us, and God will accept our worship. David says that. When we come to God with a heart set on him, “Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar” (51:19). It’s not that the forms are wrong or that God despises the rituals of worship. It’s just that those things don’t come first. As Ellsworth Kalas says, “We fail at repentance because our friendship with God has so little passion” (86). The first thing God wants to see is our broken heart, our surrendered heart, and that’s why we need repentant prayer. Only with this kind of prayer can we come before God and know our worship is pleasing to him.

When I went to college, I did the church shopping thing. I had no car, so I was limited to the churches around campus, which, at Ball State, are rather numerous. And so every Sunday I was in town, I visited a different church, and it became sort of funny because every church I visited was serving communion that morning. After three or four times of this, I began to wonder if God was trying to tell me something. Communion was comforting, though. Having grown up in the Methodist church, with our open table, communion was something I had always been able to participate in. It was something I was familiar with. And so I went along, but as the weeks went by, I started to realize I was just taking communion because I always had. It wasn’t that it didn’t mean anything; it just didn’t mean a whole lot. It was a reminder of Jesus’ death for me. But somewhere in that process, I was struck by the power of that statement. It wasn’t meant to be just a reminder; this was what Jesus gave us to remind us constantly of the high cost of forgiveness. To forgive us, he took our penalty. He took our death. He died for our sins. He died for my sins. He died so I could be forgiven. And in the midst of that first year at college, holy communion took on a power and a meaning it had never had before. The form didn’t change. The words didn’t change. The elements didn’t change (except for the one Lutheran church I visited where they used wine instead of grape juice!). I changed. I began to see in that bread and in that cup more than a reminder or a memorial. This is what it cost God to forgive me. The cross is what it cost. Jesus was the final sacrifice. And suddenly, as that truth sunk down into my heart like never before, repentance and forgiveness took on a deeper significance.

And so, back to John, and the question I asked at the outset: why did they come out to the desert to see this crazy preacher? Could it be the longing that is in every human heart to experience forgiveness? Could it be the people had this desire to reconnect with God, and John’s ministry was the first thing in a long time that seemed to help in that regard? Could it be that, in the waters of baptism there in the Jordan River, the people found an outward symbol of something happening deep within them? They knew the sacrifices were mostly for show. They knew that without a real heart change, the sacrifices were just a brutal, bloody routine. And, for that matter, so was the water in the Jordan. But something in John’s preaching, something in his call for repentance, resonated in their hearts.

So what about you? I don’t pretend to be as powerful a preacher as John was, nor are you likely to find me in camel’s hair (nor will I eat locusts). But what is there in David’s heartfelt, honest cry to God that resonates in your heart today? More specifically, what is there you need to experience forgiveness from today? David tells us that if we ask for mercy, confess our sin using those most difficult words, and seek a new beginning, he will use us as witnesses that forgiveness is possible, release from sin and guilt and shame is possible. So what is it in your life this morning you need to talk with God about? We have this promise, a promise David knew and the reason he prayed as he did: “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Can you believe that promise? Can you grab onto that promise today?

I’m going to pray for all of us this morning, and then during the final song, I’d invite you, if you want, to come and pray at the kneelers this morning. You can, of course, pray in your seat, but sometimes, that movement forward, that physical movement toward the altar and the cross is important as we seek to move closer to God. If you need someone or want someone to pray with you, grab them or find a Stephen Minister. But my prayer and hope today is that none of us leave here without having done what David did, to pray for mercy, to confess our sins, to seek a new beginning and to be a witness of God’s mercy. So let’s pray, and sing, and pray some more.

Reckless Gratitude

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Psalm 92; Luke 17:11-19

September 9, 2012 • Portage First UMC

Recently I read about a bridal shower where the bride-to-be asked everyone to fill out an envelope with their address on it. Not an unreasonable request. But when the envelopes were collected, a generic “thank you” note was inserted in each one and they were put in the mail. No signature. No reference to any particular gift or expression of love. Just a generic “Thank you for sharing in our shower” note. No real gratitude (cf. Kalas, Longing to Pray, pg. 61). And I wonder—have we really gotten to the place where we think we don’t really have to say “thank you”? Have we lost the art of genuinely being grateful for what we have or what we have received? Because if we have, we’re in trouble. Gratitude is the oil the keeps the gears of life moving, as one author has put it. Gratitude is at the heart of true friendship and good relationships, and more than that, gratitude is something we need to do for our mental, spiritual and emotional well-being. “We say thank you not simply because the other person deserves the word but also because we need to say it” (Kalas 73). I wonder: are we suffering from a gratitude deficit?

So how often do we treat God like that bride-to-be treated her guests and family and friends? I don’t know about you, but it’s all too easy for me, in my own prayer life, to dive right into asking for what I want. Like a child at Christmastime, I rattle off my “wish list,” and all the things I would like God to do for me and for others, and if I do get around to saying “thank you,” I’ll often throw up some generic “thanks for this day, thanks for my family,” and so on. Sort of like we do at Thanksgiving tables when we hurry around and name some generic blessing because we’re in a rush to get to the turkey! If gratitude is the oil of friendship in human relationships, how much more is it needed in our friendship with God. When talking with God, are we as grateful as we are demanding?

This month, we are looking at the ways we talk with God, and how that ongoing conversation builds our relationship with our creator. Last week, we talked about our need for honest and candid prayer, how we can say exactly what is on our mind because God is being enough to handle it. This morning, we want to talk about gratitude, something we far too often overlook when we communicate with God. And to do that, we’re going to shortly turn to the psalms, the prayerbook of the Bible, but first I want to look at a well-known Gospel story that Luke records—a story that is far too often a mirror for our own lives.

Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, as he often is in Luke’s Gospel, and this particular day, he’s in a village—we don’t know which village, but it’s on the border between Galilee and Samaria. Samaria, you might remember, was the place where those half-breeds, the Samaritans, lived. They were the folks whose ancestors had intermarried with foreigners and, to a good orthodox Jew, they were no longer true Jews. In fact, to avoid the risk of contamination, most would cross the Jordan River and travel on the other side to avoid going through Samaria. We know Jesus wasn’t like that, though, and on this day, he even enters this border town where there are ten lepers. Ten men with a serious skin disease that, most people thought, was passed from person to person by physical contact. Lepers were required to stay away from healthy people, to not come in contact with them, and to live outside the village. Many people saw the lepers as sinners; they were being punished for something with this disease. And so, they were removed from their families, from the community, from any semblance of normal life (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 198). Even when they see Jesus, Luke says they stand at a distance and cry out to him, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” (17:13).

That word, “pity,” means they were seeking help. They’re not just asking Jesus to feel sorry for them or their situation, as we might mean if we use that word. They believe Jesus can do something about their situation, he can make them better, even though they may not deserve it. “See our situation, Jesus,” they’re saying, “and make us well.” And what happens next is what Michael Card calls one of Jesus’ “unmiraculous miracles” (Card 198). There is no waving of the hands or any sort of special prayer said. There’s no bright light—in fact, Jesus doesn’t even touch them or tell them they are healed. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss the miracle altogether. All Jesus says is, “Go, show yourselves to the priests” (17:14). It was the priests’ job to declare whether or not they had been healed; they could not return home until the priest said so. And Luke says “as they went” they were healed (17:14). Actually, he says they were “cleansed,” which has to be with the whole person—body, mind and soul. This sort of cleansing is seen as a gift of God, not something that is earned (Green, The Gospel of Luke, pg. 624). It’s another part of the unmiraculous miracle. So on the way, they suddenly notice something different. They are whole again. I wonder…had they been sick so long that they had forgotten what it felt like to be healthy? Had they given up hope? Whatever is going through their minds, once they realize they are cleansed, they run all the faster toward the priests. As soon as they were seen by the priest, they could go home, see their families, get back to their life. And so they run toward the local priest.

Or at least nine of them do. One of them stops in his tracks when he realizes he has been healed. Somehow, he notices that the leprosy is gone, so he stops and turns around. Now, Luke wants you to know this man was not a Jew; he is a Samaritan. He is a hated foreigner, and so Luke implies, then, that the other nine are Jews. They are, in their own minds, the faithful ones of God, better than this hated Samaritan, only associating with him because they all shared the same disease. And yet, it’s only the Samaritan who stops, turns around, and runs back to Jesus to thank him. The rest hurry back to their lives, but this man throws himself on the ground and thanks Jesus. The posture is one of worship, of prayer—laying prostrate on the ground, face in the dust, giving thanks. We saw that same image last week when Jesus is in Gethsemane, praying the most honest prayer—face down in the dust. And this prayer, while very honest, is not focused on asking for anything. It’s focused on thankfulness for what the man has already received. The word Luke uses to describe the man giving thanks is “eucharisteo”—eucharist, which is the same word many traditions use to describe holy communion. The Eucharist. The time we give thanks for God doing what was necessary to save us. This man has only one thing on his mind at this point, to give thanks for the healing he has received, for salvation from this wasting disease. God has done something marvelous in his life, and he rushes back to give thanks. But “where are the other nine?” Jesus asks, although he knows. They’ve taken the gift but ignored the giver. And so, to the Samaritan, Jesus says, “You have a new life—go live it.” “Your faith has made you well” (17:19). You can almost hear the smile in Jesus’ voice because the heart of Jesus is touched by a simple gesture of gratitude.

But we shouldn’t be surprised by that, because all throughout the Old Testament, and especially in the psalms, we hear God’s people praying prayers of gratitude. Psalm 92 is one example; we could give literally hundreds of examples of such prayer. Gratitude is a mark of a healthy prayer life. “Gratitude,” writes Ellsworth Kalas, “is a right estimate of our relationship with God, to others, and to life itself, because gratitude is the recognition that no one is a solitary achiever, no one has accumulated success or wealth unaided” (74). That’s what the Samaritan leper knew—he did not find healing himself. It came from Jesus. And that’s what the psalmists knew—what they had did not come from themselves. It all comes from God. We’ve subscribed to the American lie of the “self-made person,” but there is no such thing. To the proud Corinthians (much like us in many ways), Paul asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). In other words, why are you so proud of the things you didn’t really earn or do? Everything is a gift, and we are called to be people of gratitude, especially toward God.

So, we may sometimes give thanks in our prayers, but how specific are we in our gratitude? Don’t we tend to give thanks rather generally? “Thank you for this day. Thank you for everything. Bless everybody.” And so on. “We use the general because we’re lazy,” Ellsworth Kalas says (58). A lazy relationship is taken over by generalities. So we pray in general for our church, for our country, for people we know. And that enables us to get done with our prayers as quickly as possible. But the psalmists were not lazy in their prayers. They are specific. When it comes to confessing sin, they name the sin. When it comes to giving thanks, they name what they are thankful for. If you follow the readings this week, you’re going to read several “thanksgiving” psalms where the psalmist is thankful for this part of his life or that part. And the psalmist refuses to just spout generalities, or to repeat the same thing over and over again like we do. As I said last week, stick around the church long enough and you get good at “Christian-ese,” so much so you won’t even have to think too much about your prayers. You just repeat lofty phrases. You know, that’s what the Pharisee did in Luke 18, where he prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11). Jesus says God the Father is not impressed by such prayers. Rather, we’re called to be grateful for specific things, and this engages our minds and our imaginations as well. Psalm 136, for instance: God, I thank you for the skies, for the sea, for the sun, for the way you rescued our people, for the way you led our people through the wilderness, for the kings that were swept out of our way (and he names them), for the food you give to every creature, and so on. Specificity in our gratitude engages us in the conversation with God and helps us connect more with the God who created us. Specificity helps us engage in reckless gratitude—because once you start giving thanks for the details in your life, you may find it hard to quit. What do we have that we didn’t receive? What do we have that we aren’t able to give God thanks for?

And so, Psalm 92. It’s an authorless psalm; by that I mean it’s one of more than forty psalms whose author’s name is lost to history. We also don’t know when it was written. We don’t know the situation or the history. All we know is it is a psalm that was written to be sung on the Sabbath day. It’s a psalm for worship, for the community. So the psalmist begins, “It is good to praise the Lord and make music to your name, O Most High” (92:1). What we read as “praise the Lord” is a word that has multiple meanings, which is why it may be written differently in your Bible. It can mean “praise,” or “give thanks,” or even “give confession.” All of that is wrapped up in community worship. But my favorite definition of this word is “to cast down.” “It is good to cast down before the Lord” is one way this verse might be read, and that brings to mind the image from the book of Revelation of the worship in heaven. Do you remember that? Revelation 4:10 tells us how the twenty-four elders stand before the throne of God and cast their crowns down in front of him. They give up their own authority and power to recognize God’s authority and power, to show their gratitude for all God has done in saving humanity. That’s the same image we have here at the beginning of Psalm 92—when we praise, when we give thanks, it’s a way of recognizing that God is God and we are not (cf. Williams, Communicator’s Commentary: Psalms 73-150, pg. 174). And the psalmist says such action is “good.” It’s to our benefit, our welfare, to recognize God’s authority in our lives by giving thanks.

So when is the right time to do that, to give thanks? The psalmist says we can do it “in the morning” and “at night” (92:2). In other words, give thanks all the time. Recognize God’s presence in everything. When you get up in the morning: “Thank you, God, for the good night’s sleep. Thank you for watching over me all night. Thank you for the ability to see, to hear, to move around.” As you shower: “Thank you for the privilege of clean safe water. I recognize that I am blessed by having something many in the world do not.” As you drive to work or to the coffee shop or to the next appointment: “Thank you, God, for this transportation. I recognize that only about nine percent of the world owns a car. I am blessed.” When you pay bills: “Thank you, God, that I am able to do this, that I have the resources to provide for myself and my family.” When you eat a meal: “Thank you, God, for this food, and help me never to take it for granted as I remember the many who are starving this very moment.” Probably that’s the moment, if there is any, we do approach gratitude, because many of us have been taught to pray before a meal. But how often do we hurry through it? How often do we skip it if we’re out in a restaurant? And do we really stop long enough to be truly grateful? And there are so many other things we can be grateful for. Even when we go to bed at night: “Thank you, God, for the gifts of friendship and companionship that I experienced today [you can even name those you spent time with]. Thank you for this bed that is so comfortable. Thank you for the peacefulness of the night.” I think you get the point. In the morning, at night, and every moment in between, the psalmist says, those are moments for gratitude, because everything we have comes from God.

Then, notice one way the psalmist suggests we offer thanks to God. He says, “It is good to…make music to your name, O Most High” (92:1). And then, in verse 3, he says to celebrate with the “the ten-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp” (92:3). Now, we can do a couple of things with that verse. We can become legalistic about it, and say that since this psalm only mentions the lyre and the harp, that’s all we should use to praise God, to give thanks. Or, we might loosen up a little bit and recognize that the psalms mention other instruments. Psalm 150, for instance, suggests that in addition to the harp and lyre we can use the trumpet, strings and pipe, and cymbals. We could compile a list of Biblical instruments and say those are the only ones God allows to be used in worship. But then, of course, we’d have to figure out what a “zither” is and how to play it, because Daniel specifically mentions that instrument (3:5-15). But then you’d have to throw out the piano, the organ and any soundtracks our choir/praise team uses—because none of those are mentioned in the Bible. One denomination, which throws out the Old Testament, doesn’t use any musical instruments because the New Testament doesn’t mention them. So all their singing is acapella. We could do that, or we could recognize that the psalmist is writing in a language that is understandable and contemporary to his time. The instruments and the way he suggests offering thanks and praise to God are ways his time would have understood, which should suggest to us the church’s continuing need to speak in ways and sing in ways that communicate to our world and our culture. The bigger point the psalmist is making is this: use whatever you have to give thanks to God. Sing in ways the culture will hear so they will know the goodness of our God. Reckless gratitude includes using every means we have to show our gratitude to a waiting world.

The rest of the psalm is an outpouring from verse 4. There, the psalmist sings, “You make me glad by your deeds, Lord; I sing for joy at what your hands have done” (92:4). And in the following verses, the psalmist gives thanks for what God has done. God has destroyed the evildoers and the wicked (92:7). God has scattered their enemies (92:9). God has blessed the psalmist—having oil poured over you was a sign of blessing or being anointed by God (92:10). God has defeated the enemies (quite a different viewpoint than was in last week’s psalm) and more than that, God has made the righteous to flourish (92:11-15). All of that, all of those specific reasons for gratitude can be summed up in one sentence: the psalmist is grateful for what God has done for them to provide salvation, to bring hope to their lives. For the psalmist, as for the Scriptures in general, you don’t separate what God does from who God is. Because God is loving, God saves his people. Because God is good, God destroys the evil. Who God is is what God does (cf. VanGemeren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, pg. 604), and so the resounding chorus of the psalm (and of the Bible beyond the psalms) is this: “Thank you, God, for the ways you have worked to save us from those things that threaten us.”

Sometimes, though, being people of gratitude involves confession of the ways we have failed to live gratefully, of the places we have taken God’s goodness for granted, like the nine lepers who ran on did. This week, on Tuesday, we will remember a Tuesday morning some eleven years ago. We’ll remember where we were when the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon, when the plane went down in Pennsylvania. I’ll remember picking Christopher up at school that day and being grateful to be able to hold onto him, even though he had no idea what was happening. For many of us, that day shook us to the core and caused us to realize how ungrateful we had been for the many blessings God has given us. I think that’s one reason churches were full that following Sunday. People were reminded of the need to be grateful to God for everything. But, I wonder if, in eleven years, we have really learned anything. Have we learned gratitude? Or have we, as it seems to be, slipped back into the mentality that everything is owed to me? You see, while that day eleven years ago caused us to reflect on the things we have, I’m not sure we went deep enough. Did we ever really confess our reliance on things and our selfishness and greed—really the things that brought us to that day? Despite the proclamations of the TV preachers about the reasons for the attacks, I think we came to realize it was our arrogance, our hubris, our loss of a moral compass that caused others to hate us, to attack us. I don’t believe and have never believed that 9/11 was some form of God’s punishment, but I do believe it should have been a reminder of our need to examine our lives and to live gratefully rather than to demand more and more and more. Sometimes gratitude calls us to confession, to realize our neglect of the poor (those Jesus cared deeply about), to confess our loss of faith and our shallowness of spirit. As Dr. Kalas puts it, “I can never know the wondrous specifics of God’s grace except as I face up to the specific facts of my sins that make grace both necessary and amazing” (Kalas 64). Grateful prayer ought to reach to the very core of who we are.

So how do we live gratefully? Simply put: fill your day with gratitude. When I wake up in the morning, after yanking the iPod off the alarm so it doesn’t go off again, I lay there for a moment in the silence and I pray a prayer that goes something like this: “God, thank you for this day. Thank you for my wife, who is better to me than I deserve. Thank you for my kids who so often show me what love looks like. And thank you for whatever chance I have to serve you today.” And then, throughout the day, I’m trying to live more gratefully, where rather than complaining that I don’t have this I can give thanks that I do have that. It’s so easy in our world to slip into envy and jealousy, where we constantly want something more, something else. And yet, the psalms (and the story of the lepers) call us to give thanks for what we have and for those unexpected and unearned moments of grace that surprise us. And at night, I pray a pretty short prayer, because I’m not a night owl and I usually fall asleep pretty quickly. So I often pray something as simple as, “Thank you, Lord, for this day, the good and the bad, and thank you for being with me throughout all of it.” Reckless gratitude is a matter of opening our eyes, being aware of the ways we can be and need to be thankful throughout our days, and turning those moments into prayer.

So how will you give thanks? How will you practice reckless gratitude? Will you be among the nine who take what you can from Jesus and run on with your life? Or will you be the one who stops and gives thanks to Jesus for all he has done? And what will you give thanks for? This morning, we have an opportunity to do just that. Along the back of the sanctuary this morning is our Wall of Gratitude, and in just a few moments, we’re going to give you the chance to go to that wall and write a word or two of something you’re grateful for today, right now. Just a word or two. We’re going to leave the wall up for a couple of weeks and you can feel free to add to it in the weeks to come, or when you’re by here during the week. My prayer is that as we see what others are grateful for, it will inspire our prayers of gratitude. So, this will be our prayer this morning, a prayer of gratitude, a prayer of the congregation, because “it is good to give thanks to the Lord” (92:1). Amen.

Down in the Dust

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Psalm 44; Mark 14:32-42

September 2, 2012 • Portage First UMC

In many ways, we pastors have done you a disservice by being too willing to pray whenever there’s a need. Some of that willingness, especially among Methodist pastors, is because our founder, John Wesley, once said, “At a moment’s notice, a Methodist preacher needs to be able to preach, pray or die!” And so we’re always ready—but the end result is a whole generation (or two) of people who are very uncomfortable praying, especially praying out loud. I’ve had many people tell me, “Oh, you go ahead, you’re the professional.” I’ve even had people tell me God listens to me better, that somehow the idea is if I pray or Pastor Deb prays, God will have to listen and/or grant the prayer request—just because it’s a pastor praying! Well, I’ve got some heartbreaking news for you today—that simply isn’t true. There was not a single required class in seminary on prayer, and although I did take a class on prayer, it was a self-study. And when I was ordained and Pastor Deb was licensed, there was no bolt from the sky or a voice that said, “Your prayers will now be answered.” The reality is we, as pastors, learn how to pray the same way everyone else does—by praying.

For the last month, we’ve been talking about various sorts of relationships—family, marriage, friendships—and last Sunday we talked about our relationship with God and the way God loves us and calls us to love others. But what I was reminded of as we walked through that series is that every one of those relationships depends on communication. If you don’t talk to your family, or your friends, or your spouse, chances are those relationships won’t last very long. Communication is essential, and that’s even more true in our relationship with God. If we never talk to God or let God talk to us, what kind of relationship can we hope for? So this month, September, we’re going to explore prayer—especially the kind of prayer that comes out of the hard times in our lives, those times when we talk to God or yell at God or are disappointed with God and yet the conversation goes on. It’s in those times we most need to hear from God. And yet, as sophisticated modern people, we’re uncomfortable with the idea that God might speak to us. In fact, as Lily Tomlin once said, “When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.” That pretty much sums up our world, doesn’t it? Talking to God is okay, but suggest that God might talk back and you’ll get all sorts of strange looks.

And yet, the psalms speak to God as if they expected a response. The psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, and so for this month, we’re going to look at some of the psalms and the ways they teach us to talk with God and to listen for God. When you read the book of psalms, you’ll find every human emotion imaginable. Sometimes the images are very raw, and sometimes it hurts even to read the words. One person has called the psalms “just now” prayers; they reflect the writer’s feelings and emotions at that very moment (Kalas, Longing to Pray, pgs. 21). They’re not polished or airbrushed or edited. They show us how the writer felt at that very moment (Kalas 18-19). And because they are so utterly human and sometimes very raw, the psalms, for generations, have not remained as written prayers on a page but have often been the prayers of God’s people in those times when we don’t have our own words to pray. The psalms teach us how to pray in times when life seems difficult or unfair, when our face is down in the dust. Such prayer requires honesty and candidness—and Psalm 44 certainly gives us both of those things.

Psalm 44 is a lament, a complaint psalm. There are more laments in the book of psalms than any other kind of prayer (Kalas 21), at least in part because laments allow us to express our true feelings of disappointment, sadness, grief and loss. The fact that these psalms were included in the Hebrew Scriptures and kept over these many centuries is proof that our God is a God who can be spoken to bluntly, candidly, with absolute honesty. God is big enough to handle whatever we feel we need to say. Now, while there are many psalms that are individual laments or complaints, Psalm 44 is a national or communal lament. It is a prayer of grief over the fate of the nation—in this case, the nation of Israel (VanGemeren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, pg. 337; Williams, Communicator’s Commentary: Psalms 1-72, pg. 319). It was written at some point (we don’t know when) after Israel had lost a battle, had apparently been defeated quite soundly. In Psalm 44, the writer starts off remembering the ways God has been faithful in the past, the ways God showed his faithfulness to their ancestors: “You drove out the nations and planted our ancestors; you crushed the peoples and made our ancestors flourish” (44:2). Now, it’s not that God needed reminding of what happened in the past; rather, when we’re in the midst of grief or lament, it’s vital for us to remember what has gone before. It’s critical that we know the difficulties of today are not the gold standard by which our lives are measured. When we are going through a dark time, it’s easy for us to think that’s all there ever was and all there ever will be. We see everything through the lens of darkness. But this psalmist, though he is going through a hard time—in fact, the whole nation is—slows down long enough to remember. It hasn’t always been this way. At one time, God seemed to be on their side. At one time, God won victories in battle for the people. In fact the psalmist personalizes it: “I put no trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory; but you give us victory over our enemies, you put our adversaries to shame” (44:6-7). Again, it’s not a matter of reminding God. What the psalmist is doing is reminding himself in God’s presence. Holy memory, you might say. Rehearsing the past in the midst of the lament of the present. “We will praise your name forever” (44:8), he says.

Since this is a national lament, let me pause here and just say a word or two about the dangers of mixing religion and patriotism, a danger that always is present but especially, in our country, during an election year. I’m going to have more to say on this in a few weeks, but here’s the essence of the problem: both sides always want to claim God being on their side, whether you’re talking about a war between nations or an election between parties. I’ve known people who, when their “side” loses an election or something like that, go into deep depression, and then make statements like, “God must be testing us.” Nationalism is dangerous, because we assume, if God is on “our side,” we will always win. And when we lose, as has happened to the psalmist, our faith can be seriously shaken. Patriotism—being proud of your country—is a right and good thing. Nationalism—where we claim “divine power” is on our side—is dangerous. Every time you mix God and the state, God loses. As I said, we’ll talk more about that as we get closer to the election, but I just wanted to mention it here because of the nature of this psalm. The praise at the beginning is critical, because it reminds us that God is still God, whether “our side” wins or not. 

So the psalmist starts off in a good direction: we will praise your name forever, God, even when it seems you have deserted us. We will still praise your name. Even though our spirits are down in the dust, we will still sing of your power. You are still our King and God. The psalmist needs to be reminded of that commitment, that covenant. He needs to know that the relationship between the people and God is not going to be taken away based on what he says next. They have a covenant, an everlasting binding promise. That is, after all, what a covenant is: a binding promise made in a time of strength that will hold onto us in a time of weakness. In the midst of lament, the psalmist remembers the relationship. We will [not might, not depending on how this all comes out] praise your name forever. That’s the first eight verses; in the rest of the psalm, the writer spells out his complaint against God and against the current situation. And here is where the utter candor and honesty come out—but again, it only comes out because he knows he can trust God to not walk away—unlike human beings. There are certain things we’ll tell certain people. We want to know the other person is trustworthy and won’t run away from our grief if we share it. And so we tend to hold back, to not be as honest as we might be or could be. But with God, there is no need to hold back. The psalmist knows that. We can be utterly honest with God because God’s not going anywhere.

The situation, as I said, is apparently one in which Israel went to battle and lost, and the conclusion, at least of the psalmist, is that they lost because God didn’t fight for them. They were counting on God to do most of the work and God let them down. And the psalmist isn’t shy about saying that. “You made us retreat…you gave us up to be devoured like sheep…you sold your people for a pittance…you have made us a byword among the nations” (44:10-14). They’ve been conquered, scattered and enslaved by their enemies, and maybe worst of all, other people are talking about them. Their name has been disgraced, and the psalmist is left feeling that God cares little for these people who are supposed to be his precious possession (cf. VanGemeren 340). It’s a bold, raw prayer.

And to top it off, the psalmist says God has done this regardless of the people’s behavior. From his perspective, the people have done nothing to deserve this. “All this came upon us, though we had not forgotten you; we had not been false to your covenant” (44:17). In other words, you forgot us, God, but we didn’t forget you. This is all your fault! Isn’t that the way we usually respond, too? We’re innocent, God! You’re doing this to us even though we’ve not wandered away from you! How could you let this happen to innocent little me? I didn’t do anything to deserve this! “When life is falling apart, we cling to the idea that it shouldn’t happen to us” (Kalas 20). That’s the psalmist’s response, which, if you know the story of the Old Testament, is sort of hard to believe. The repeated cycle in the Old Testament is this: faithfulness to God for a short time, things get good, the people forget God, they run after other gods, and then when things get bad, they come running back to God and ask him to protect them. That’s the Old Testament in a nutshell. It’s a story of Israel’s repeated cycles of faithfulness and unfaithfulness to God. Now, we don’t know when this psalm was written, but was there ever really a time when the whole people were blameless? Is there ever a time when we are blameless? I’m not saying God did this punishment to Israel for any particular misdeed. What I’m saying is that the psalmist does what we do: we want to blame God for our misfortune when it may be something much closer to home. Maybe they lost the battle because they fought poorly. Maybe our circumstances have come about because of poor choices we have made rather than because of God’s direct punishment. Or maybe they’ve come about because of the choices of others that are out of our control. And yet, the psalmist isn’t afraid to confront God, nor should we be. Candor and honesty are critical to a healthy prayer life, and God will never be shocked by anything we say (cf. Kalas 22).

For example, look at Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Jesus was known throughout his ministry for withdrawing to lonely places to pray, to seek solitude. I would guess he did that from early on in his life, though we don’t know that. We do know that throughout the three years of his ministry, he would take off, sometimes very early in the morning, to pray. And, apparently, when he was in Jerusalem, he prayed often in this garden that sits at the foot of the Mount of Olives. You can see the Temple Mount from that garden, and not far from the garden is an olive press, a “gethsemane.” That’s how the garden got its name. On his last night with his disciples, Jesus chooses this place that was familiar to him and to them for a time of prayer. After the last supper, he takes them there, leaves eight of them at the gate and takes his three closest friends further into the garden. “‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ he said to them. ‘Stay here and keep watch’” (14:34). And then Jesus prays one of the most honest prayers ever recorded. In fact, the Gospel writers tell us, in essence, his face is down in the dust. He’s prostrate before his heavenly father, praying. Jesus, the Son of God, who knew why he had come and what he had to do, prays, “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me” (14:36). I don’t want to do this, he prays. I don’t want to endure the pain and the suffering that is coming tomorrow on the cross. Father, there must be some other way. Jesus prays this in utter faithfulness and trust, because he ends his prayer: “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (14:36). Three times he prays this—and I imagine his prayer wasn’t as short as Mark records it to be. I imagine there was a lengthy struggle; Dr. Luke, in his gospel, tells us Jesus prayed so intensely that his sweat was “like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). That’s a detail, by the way, only a doctor would think to include! So Jesus struggles in Gethsemane, but his prayer is consistently honest because he’s praying to his father—and he knows his Father is big enough to handle honest and candid prayer. In times of struggle, we can pray everything that’s on our heart because God is big enough to handle it. 

But what do we do instead? We fake it with “religious language.” Stick around the church long enough—any church—and you’ll become proficient in “Christian-ese.” It’s a special language in which there don’t seem to be any words for pain, hurt, or failure. We use words like “the victorious life” and “God’s smiling on me.” One time in seminary chapel, our speaker asked, “Have you ever noticed how everyone’s plans always work? Every church growth strategy, every personal spiritual development plan—in every book in every Christian bookstore, everything always works.” And so even when we do talk about our pain, we gloss over it with “I’m just waiting on God to bring me victory.” Or, “If God brought me to it, God will bring me through it.” And it’s not that there’s necessarily anything false in those statements. It’s just that they’re not very honest with where we are at the moment. And they’re not very Biblical—because, honestly, the psalmist has no guarantee that God will bring him through it. Or the other thing we do is put out false bravado, much as Peter does in the story of the last supper, which Mark reports just before what we read today. Jesus tells the disciples they will all fall away, they will all betray him. And Peter speaks up: “Even if all fall away, I will not” (14:28). Now, how do you think the other disciples reacted to that kind of a statement? He’s basically saying, “These other guys, they won’t last. But me, Jesus, I’ll be there, right by your side!” He wants to appear powerful, strong, not weak like the rest of them. And Jesus tells him, “Tonight…you yourself will disown me three times” (14:30). Peter insists he will not, even if he has to die, and the others murmur their agreement, but the truth is, they all fell away, just as Jesus said they would. Our false bravado does not impress God. What does impress God is a heart that prays honestly and candidly. 

Here’s the difference between the psalmist and most of us: he’s not afraid to confront God, even publicly. He’s not afraid to trust that the covenant will hold. He’s not afraid to be honest, and to call God to account, to ask God to still come to their aid. “Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever…Rise up and help us; rescue us because of your unfailing love” (44:23, 26). And that request is really the end of the story we have; because we don’t know when this happened, what the historical situation was, we have no idea how God answered this prayer. But I believe that one of the reasons this psalm was preserved, was kept in this collection of prayers of the Hebrew people, is because God did answer—maybe not in the way they wanted, but somewhere along the way, the people got the message that it was okay to be honest with God. You can express yourself and know the covenant is secure. Even when the way is dark, we can trust those things we learned when life wasn’t so dark (cf. Williams 321). God’s not going to walk off even if you are completely honest with him.

Many of you may know the story of Joni Eareckson Tada, who as a young girl was injured in a diving accident right after graduation from high school. She dove in and hit a rock and became a quadriplegic. Here was a young woman who had a bright athletic future and in an instant, it was all gone. As she lay in the hospital, she contemplated suicide but because she couldn’t move on her own, she was unable to carry that out. In those moments of utter despair, she cried out to God and began to develop a deep relationship with him, one that eventually led her to found a ministry to champion the needs of those who are disabled. Several years ago, a reporter asked Joni if she ever gets angry with God today. She answered, “Sure, I still get angry—if my corset is pinching, or if my arm braces get in the way, or I’m visiting a friend and my catheter suddenly starts to leak all over their couch—sure, I’m angry, I’m humilitated and I want to scream, ‘Hey, God, why me?’” But, she says, “I just think it’s better to get angry at God than to walk away from him” (qtd. in Kalas 23).

That was the psalmist’s attitude. And it was even Jesus’ attitude on that last night, there in Gethsemane. So, let me ask you—where are the rough places in your life right now? In what situation do you feel like God has abandoned you? Can you be honest about that? This morning, we’re going to share in Holy Communion, which reminds us of the time when the disciples most felt abandoned, the crucifixion, when it seemed as if evil had triumphed over good. And yet, even in the midst of that most horrible of events, God was working to bring salvation to the world. The ultimate good out of the ultimate evil. This bread, this cup—they remind us that even when it feels like God has abandoned us, God is still working, still moving. It reminds us that the worst thing is never the last thing. And so, as we come to the table this morning, I invite you to prayer—to honest, candid prayer. You may feel like you are down in the dust, all alone, so my prayer this morning is that, as you are honest about that, you will find in this bread and cup a reminder of God’s presence with you, even when it seems all is lost. Let’s come to table as people of honest, candid prayer—people who, no matter what, still pray, “In God we make our boast all day long, and we will praise your name forever” (44:8). Let’s prepare our hearts for holy communion this morning.