Scripture: Psalm 131; Matthew 6:24-34
This is one of those Sundays when I turn to the lectionary scriptures, two of them. Although the Matthew scripture about the lilies of the field is one of my favorites, as I know it is for many others, I want to begin by reflecting on the Psalm, Psalm 131, one of the lesser known of the Psalms, certainly one of the shortest, but also one that although I would not describe it as one of my favorites, I have something of a fondness for.
The Psalms, as you are probably aware, can be quite…honest. They can be disturbingly honest, even brutally honest, quite openly expressing emotions that are real but not necessarily admirable such as self-pity, jealousy, or revenge. Psalm 137 for instance begins with an understandable sense of grief because of the Jewish people having been carried off into captivity: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept…for there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormenters demanded mirth…” But then just a few verses later the grief turns to something else as the Psalm concludes: “O Babylon, happy shall they be who pay you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”
Nice! This may be an honest expression of what the Psalm writer was feeling, but I would say what we have here is just a little too much honesty, more honesty than we really need. In fact it almost takes your breath away. Do human beings actually have such feelings? Honestly, yes, we do. And it is important to acknowledge that we do. We can’t deal with such feelings unless we acknowledge them. But that is not the same thing as being proud of them or expressing them without restraint or embarrassment. If the Psalm writer is not embarrassed to write them, and there is no indication that he or she is, I am embarrassed that words like that appear in my scriptures with no asterisks or disclaimers of any kind. It would be better if there were a footnote that said that the views expressed here are not necessarily the views of management. The Psalms, as I say, can be disturbingly and brutally honest. This is just one example.
But sometimes the Psalms can be refreshingly honest. For me Psalm 131 falls into that category. It begins: “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high…” When I ran across this verse many years ago as I was browsing through the Psalms, it caught my eye and I had to stop and smile and whisper a thank you. So often the language of our worship is in a different spirit from this. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship God with gladness. Come into God’s presence with singing.” “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, o my soul! I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to the Lord all my life long.” “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord.” You know what I mean. The language of our worship tends to be upbeat and positive and joyful. To be sure, I have been in congregations where people said things like “Make a joyful noise to the Lord” and “praise the Lord” and “we lift our hearts up to the Lord”, where people would say such things very seriously and about as joylessly and lifelessly as you could imagine. That’s true. But even if we do not always say it believably, the language of worship in my mind tends to be the language of praise and thanksgiving and so forth.
And that’s all fine. I want there to be joy in worship. I hope that if people come to worship in not the best of spirits that they will find something there that will raise their spirits. But I also appreciated running across this verse from the Psalms that recognizes the fact that we do not always come into God’s presence with singing, that we do not always feel very much like making a joyful noise to the Lord, that we just are not always in a very upbeat kind of place when we come to a time of worship, and at least on some days we are just not gonna be. “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high…” And so I recall being thankful for finding this verse that recognized that I am not always thankful, not always joyful, not always just overflowing with praise when I come into God’s presence. I recall being thankful for this bit of honesty in the Psalms, and for having someplace to turn when I am not able to relate so well to joyful noises.
And being thankful to find this verse quietly nestled away in the Psalms led me to be thankful not just for finding this kindred voice in the Psalms, but also thankful to God for recognizing me, as I believe God has and does, on those occasions when my spirit was not joyful, when my heart was not lifted up, when I was just sort of a quiet Christian, and feeling maybe like not very much of a Christian, nestled in among all the other Christians who might be offering up their songs and their praises and loudly professing their faith. God is like that, I thought then and think today. In fact I have a vision that is connected with this unassuming verse of scripture. It is a vision of God, say on a Sunday morning, when millions of Christians are gathered to worship, seeing all these people singing and praying and preaching but God’s eyes are not trained so much on all the activity but God’s eyes are searching, searching for those people whose hearts at that time are not lifted up, whose hearts are feeling more heavy than lifted up and whose eyes are more downcast than raised very high. I believe God is like that, searching out especially those of us who, at any given time for whatever reason, may not feel like we can join wholeheartedly in making a joyful noise to God.
This is the first thought I want to leave with you on the basis of Psalm 131, just the image of God searching out people whose hearts are not lifted up. That image is particularly appropriate and has a special weightiness, it seems to me, given that it’s Memorial Day weekend. I know we remember particularly soldiers and families of soldiers on Memorial Day but I am thinking particularly this Memorial Day of a God who is searching out all those whose hearts have been made heavy by having lost someone dear to them in war, particularly the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the families of American soldiers, of Iraqi and Afghani soldiers, of Afghani and Iraqi civilians, some 100,000 of them. There are so many whose hearts have been made heavy, and indeed as we are reminded of the losses and the human costs of war in all generations, none of our hearts are lifted up. But I am imagining today a God who is seeking out all those who, because of war, harbor within themselves a grief that will never go away.
I don’t want to just say that and then go on to the next thought without acknowledging that we will need to come back to this in prayer time today. But I do have a next thought, and I thought earlier in the week that I would be focusing on this next thought more than it turns out I will, and thus the sermon title, “Things Too Marvelous”, which is taken from the second half of the first verse of the Psalm, which reads, “I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me.”
I have to say that I am not quite so appreciative of this second half of the verse as I am of the first half. I am, in fact, somewhat troubled by it, and I want to talk back to it. What do you mean—you Psalm 131, verse 1b—what do you mean by saying “I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me”? Saying that something is “too great or marvelous for me” suggests that it is not worth thinking about, that since we are not able to really get our minds around something, then we shouldn’t think about it at all. I should say that some translators interpret the first half of the verse to be saying something like, “O Lord, I do not have an arrogant heart,” that is a heart that is not lifted up in that sense, a proud heart, a heart that thinks too much and doesn’t know its place in the scheme of things. And if that is the meaning of this whole Psalm, then for me it is no longer affirming, but represents a kind of faith I cannot accept, the kind of faith that says don’t think about anything, just believe what some outside authority tells you, don’t ask questions, faith is a mystery that is just to be accepted, and so on.
What would those things be that are too marvelous for us, that the Psalmist seems to suggest are things we should not occupy ourselves with? God? God certainly qualifies as something or someone who is too marvelous for us. We know that as mere humans we can’t really know God, can’t even begin to know God. God is beyond our descriptions, beyond our knowledge, beyond our grasp, beyond our understanding. Faith is built not on knowing God but on the knowledge that we cannot know God. That is all faith really knows for sure, that God is too marvelous for us, too marvelous for our limited human minds and hearts and spirits. But does this mean we can know nothing of God? Does it mean we shouldn’t talk about God or talk to God? Does it mean that we shouldn’t contemplate God? Does it mean that we shouldn’t try to imagine God in whatever partial and human ways we may have? Does it mean, to use the language of the Psalm, that we should not occupy ourselves with God or with the things of God? Because they are too marvelous for us? The answer to all those questions pretty clearly is no. The Psalms, this Psalm and all the others, are products of people whose souls are occupied with God, so they cannot be inviting us to put aside the things of God. But it does feel like those words are telling me not to question, not to get myself all stirred up by asking questions that have no answers, whereas I believe that we express our full humanity precisely by asking those questions that have no final answers, those questions that are too marvelous for us, and that our faith is stronger when we ask those questions.
OK. Now that I have got that off my chest, now that I have registered my objections and expressed my resistance to the attitude I was finding in the words of the Psalm, I will also say that I know there is something there that I need to pay attention to. It is possible for us to ask questions about God, even to ask questions of God, in a way that obscures God, or even denies God. Why do the innocent suffer? An age-old question, a question that Amber Lyon mentioned in her confirmation statement as something that she had talked about with Susan, a question that she admitted she did not have the answer for, a question none of us have the answer for. It is a good example of a question human beings do ask and that we would be less fully human if we did not ask. It is also an example of how the same question can be asked in different spirits. A person could ask why the innocent suffer in a kind of a challenging spirit, knowing there is no final answer to such a question, and ready to use that as evidence against God. Either God is not good, or there is no God. That kind of thing. Or we can ask that question as people of faith, still knowing there is no final answer, but being open nevertheless to the presence of God in situations of suffering, in situations difficult to understand or explain or comprehend, not understanding why something is happening but knowing that God is present in it, not the cause of it but present in it, and present too in our questions about why certain things happen in this world the way they do. We can ask our questions in what I would think of as believing ways, by which I simply mean being open to God, or in non-believing ways, by which I mean not being open to God.
Likewise we can contemplate God or try to imagine God in non-believing ways, knowing that all our human ways of doing these things are partial and limited and thinking therefore that all our thoughts about God are therefore the products of our own minds and therefore that we are essentially making God up. Or we can contemplate God and try to imagine God, still knowing that our ways of doing these things are partial and limited but also being open to the God who is beyond all our imagining being present as the source of our life and all our imagining, to the God who despite the mystery is also our heart’s desire.
And then beyond all the questions I also know that there is a point—and I will just quickly note that I believe what I am about to say is also the spirit of the passage about the lilies of the field—there is a point at which I need to hear the next verse of the Psalm as well. “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother. My soul is like a child being held by its mother.” There is a point at which I need to lay down my questions and give up my striving, all my striving to make life secure, my striving to accomplish things, my striving even to reach out to God and know God, there is a point at which my soul also needs to give itself over to gratitude and to trust, to let go of all my cares, however legitimate they may be, but just to let go and to lie back in the arms of God, to just lie back in those mother’s arms. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 25, 2008