RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - March 22, 2009

“For the Love of God”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Psalm 107:1-6 10-13, 17-22

Sometimes I imagine our Lenten journey as walking on a trail leading deeper and deeper into a wilderness forest. The trees are no longer maple and oak whose leaves rustle overhead in a friendly sort of way. No - now the trees are enormous looming evergreens with branches armed in spiky needles reaching across our pathway.

These trees have become progressively taller and thicker and more profuse with each passing week, closing in around and above us. What started out as a path dappled in dancing beams of sunlight is now at best a place of eerie shadows, and soon even those will be swallowed up in darkness as we move ever forward into the impending night.

Our way is quieter now too – but in a creepy and uncomfortable sort of way. Not a single bird sings. No small animals scurry by. Aloneness has left its fearsome imprint on the entire scene.

This pathway of our Lenten journey will inevitably get silently darker as we move closer to the culminating events of Holy Week – from Jesus’ pathetic entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his execution the following Friday. For us, now there is no turning back. And because we have no light in front of us just yet, we are fast becoming enshrouded in the ever more encompassing nighttime.

As the way gets darker, more than ever we need tools for our journey because we simply can not go it alone. In a quest for such tools to survive – and perhaps even thrive -as we walk inevitably to Good Friday, this year here in church we have turned to the Psalms.

Over the past several weeks, we have discovered that it is in the Psalms that we often find what we need to just keep going when the darkness comes and the chips are down.

There should be little wonder in that, of course, because the Psalms were what kept the ancient Israelites going after the destruction of ancient Jerusalem and during their subsequent decades of exile in backwater Babylon, events that shaped Jewish history almost as much as the Exodus itself did.

It was the Psalms that provided comfort to the Hebrew people, were a means to cry out to God for deliverance, afforded this ancient people some wonderful songs of celebration in the midst of their despair, and reminded them time and time again of the covenant promises of their one true God.

Psalm 107 is one of those multi-faceted poems. Even as it offers praise to God for God’s goodness, it also reminds the Jewish people of the greatest thing they learned from their experience thus far as God’s chosen people, and that is this – no matter what they did, through it all, God never stopped caring for them.

These illusions to the wilderness make this psalm a most appropriate one for Lent, one from which surely we can uncover another tool for our own Lenten journey.

Psalm 107 is a psalm of remembrance. It is a recap of Israelite history and experience. However, before the Psalmist even goes into the remembering part of his song, he first exhorts his listeners to rise up and give thanks to God. Why? “Simple,” the Psalmist seems to say. “You offer thanksgiving to God simply because God is good.”

From there, the text covers that history lesson which summarizes the types of difficulties the Israelites experienced time and time again that provoked their faithlessness – first with Moses in the wilderness and later during the Babylonian Exile. For us, these allusions are reminders of the sort of experiences that lead us as well – all these thousands of years later - to lose faith in God.

The Psalmist offers four such experiences. The first is the experience of those who are lost and wandering, like the ancient Hebrews with Moses in the desert. These are the ones who by circumstance go at life alone with no community to support them. They are the hopeless ones.

The second is the experience of those who are imprisoned, those who suffer in chains, like the Israelites after the fall of Jerusalem. These are the ones who might live behind the bars of poverty – or the padlocked bronze doors of injustice – or are penned in by fear. They are the ones living in darkness because, for them, there is no light.

The third is the experience of those who have made a mess of their lives and are in profound need of healing. These are the ones who suffer - not because of uncontrollable events, not because bad things happen to good people - but because of the lousy choices that they made. They are the ones who need forgiveness of sins, so that they might experience the fullness of God’s grace.

And finally the fourth is the experience of those who are lost. The Psalmist uses the image of being at sea in a terrible storm, being plunged to the depths and overpowered, being caught between a rock and hard place where all your skills do not make a wit of difference, where your courage is ripped away from you by the winds that buffet you aimlessly and ferociously. These are the ones who face tragedy that makes no sense, the ones who might even cry out – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

Yet, in spite of all such experiences that rightfully and rationally would cause us to lose our faith and to turn away from God, the Psalmist reminds us that in spite of all that God is good – and worthy of our unending praise. God’s love for us is a strong love, he says, and goes on forever.

To prove his point, the Psalmist reminds us that after they left Egypt, the ancient Israelites were hungry and thirsty and seemed to have nothing to sustain them. Yet they found it within themselves to cry out to God – and eventually they found hope in the Promised Land.

Likewise, those who have lived in the darkness of prison and the gloom of their own private hells and yet find it within themselves to call upon God will see the iron bars smashed and the bronze doors flung open to freedom and light.

So it will be as well for those who are sick with the sin they have brought on themselves. When they cry out for healing, God will save them from distress, from death, from the grave itself.

And finally those whose lives are at sea and who are awash in pointless tragedy, God will find them too, and the roiling waters around and within them will be calmed.

“Imagine,” the Psalmist seems to say – “all this simply because God is good, and God’s love for us is a strong love and lasts forever. God’s love never runs out.” That is sacred covenant promise that God made to the Israelites and makes to us.

You might be staggering and stumbling on the brink of exhaustion, but God will bring water for your parched throat in the nick of time and set you on the road to the Promised Land.

You might be locked away in some dark cell, but God will shatter the heavy jailhouse doors and snap the prison bars like matchsticks. God will break open your jail and let you out in the nick of time.

You may be sin sick and in desperate condition, but, if you call out to God, God will speak the word that will heal you and pull you back from the brink of death.

Your life might be awash at sea in a terrible storm. You might feel like you are being spun like a top, reeling like a drunk, not knowing which end is up.

However, when God hears your frightened cries for help, God will quiet the wind down to a whisper, put a muzzle on all the big waves, and lead you safely to harbor.

When you come right down to it, what more could you and I ask for in the dark middle of our Lenten journey as the light gets ever dimmer? What more could we ask for than the sure and steadying knowledge that God is good, that God’s love for us is a strong love and goes on forever?

In the end, the Psalmist implores us at the very least to consider that hope is worth having, that even when the path seems darkest and the journey endless, all is never completely lost. God will protect us. Salvation may not be in a form we want, but God is faithful and will never let us down. Hold on. When you are at the end of your rope, tie a knot and just hold on.

In the midst of all the anguish that closes in on us, the Psalmist says, when we cry out to God in our distress, God hears us, no matter what. Whether our pain is grounded in tragedy we can not understand or in the choices that we have consciously made, when we cry out to God, God listens. God’s love for us is a strong love and goes on forever. God is good, and God’s love never runs out.

As an unknown poet wrote:

I am not alone. I know a presence around me,
in the air I breathe within me,
in the sounds I hear beyond me,
and know their source streams from the great love
that brings and blesses all life,
always there, streaming from the birthplace of all things.

Believe that the darkness will get lighter, the Psalmist sings. Oh, not that the night will not come. In a sense, it already has. After all, each one of us in our own way has stood in the distance at Golgotha and watched in horror as he hung dead, and his mother lay in the dirt weeping at the foot of the cross. Oh, yes, we have known the night.

But remember, the dawn will come, and shadows will be chased away. And we will find ourselves in a garden in the wee hours of the morning. And we will turn around and see him – just like Mary Magdalene did - and this time we will not cry out in fear and despair. Instead we will whisper his name, so that he can say ours forever.

That is why we give thanks to God – simply for the reason that Psalmist said. We give thanks to God because God is good. God’s love for us is a strong love and goes on forever.

Sermon - March 22, 2009

“For the Love of God”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Psalm 107:1-6 10-13, 17-22

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Psalm 107:1-6 10-13, 17-22