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GRACE THROUGH THE SCRIPTURES

9/29/2019

Psalm 37:1-5
Do not fret
   because of the wicked;
do not be envious
   of wrongdoers,
for they will soon fade
   like the grass,
and wither like the green herb.
Trust in God,
   and do good;
so you will live in the land,
   and enjoy security.
Take delight
   in God,
who will give you the desires
   of your heart.
Commit your way to God;
   trust in God,
and God will act.

We’re still in our Old Testament today – finding the bible that Jesus knew. Much of what we hear in the Old Testament, especially when we read from the Prophets, is doom and gloom – always with redemption promised eventually, someday, but first, lots of doom and gloom. Last time we met I gave you an extremely brief introduction to Psalms and pointed out that this book has everything – joy, grief, hope, repentance, despair, and jubilation.

The four lectionary readings for today are an interesting mixture of all of these emotions – especially when we read them divided by which came pre-Jesus and which came after him.

The primary Old Testament reading for today is from Exodus and features God and Moses up on the mountain, with God in a fury against the people because of the golden calf they have created to worship. Here God declares to Moses, "I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them." God is clearly not in a good mood.

But Moses in turn responds to God: Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, 'I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'" And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

The Gospel reading, from Luke, is one of the “Lost and Found” stories that Jesus told his followers – this one specifically the story of the shepherd who leaves his 99 safe sheep to go out and search for and redeem his one lost lamb.

And finally, the Epistle reading comes from 1st Timothy and gives us the Apostle Paul declaring on his own behalf that I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a sinner, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

The first is from the Exodus story, a story lived and written down centuries before Jesus. The second is a story told by Jesus himself to his followers. And the third is the testimony of one who came to follow after Jesus, while never having met him in the flesh – one who, trained by pharisees himself, would have known the Hebrew scriptures as well as Jesus did.

Every one of these, including the psalm with which we began here, is a story of grace.

Like the old story of the newspaper editor who could not clearly define pornography but who “recognized it when he saw it,” we can have a hard time trying to define grace, but sometimes we manage to recognize it when we see it or hear about it.

The dictionary definition of grace is “an unmerited divine assistance given to humans.”

How would you define it? [brief group discussion]

I pulled some famous writers’ definitions of grace. Some define what grace is, and some, what grace is not. Listen now and see what you think:

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith:
"Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there."
Thomas Merton, 20th century
"Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God."
Martin Luther, 16th century
"Grace is given to heal the spiritually sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes."

My own favorite definition come from Nadia Bolz-Weber, from Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint:

God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own s**t. Grace isn't about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace - like saying, "Oh, it's OK, I'll be the good guy and forgive you." It's God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

Grace is – in short – the incredible gift of love from the one who created us -- from God forgiving the Hebrew people at Moses' request, to Jesus' Good Shepherd seeking out even the least of the little ones, to God again forgiving the intolerant Saul and allowing him to become the faithful preacher, Paul. From the very beginning we have been surrounded by God’s grace, carrying us when we thought we were stumbling all alone; encouraging us when we were lost in failure; loving us enough to forgive our greed and our occasional idiocy.

Grace is the love of God. As we were told is today's psalm reading:

Take delight in God, who will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to God; trust in God, and God will act.

** My own favorite (at the moment) description also comes from Bolz-Weber in this story from her own life experience:

“Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, 'Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.' God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, 'that’s adorable,' and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.”

That’s a God one can’t help but love – and grace we can’t help but be grateful for.

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SOMETIMES YOU GO WITH THE FLOW ...

9/22/2019

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It was one of those Sundays - I was well prepared, had a message all ready to go. I even remembered to light the candles which, if you knew us better, you'd understand as a somewhat rare event.
But it didn't work out quite as planned. It turned out to be a "needing to talk" day. Do you ever have those in your churches? There's a full liturgy planned out but then the Spirit speaks up and says, "Wait a minute. There's something here on someone's mind. You need to give it space." And so you do.
And you just talk and listen to each other. And everything that needs to be said gets said and heard.
Then we sang a song, and we shared communion, and we offered each other peace, and went out into the week ahead of us.

Blessings on your week. See you next Sunday.

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THEIR STORY / OUR STORY

9/8/2019

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Psalm 1
Happy are those who do not follow
the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of God,
and on God's law they meditate
day and night.
They are like trees planted in streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff
that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for God watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

If we are reading the Old Testament this summer in some attempt to hear the scriptures as Jesus knew them (as we are), we can hardly go any farther without looking, however briefly, into Psalms.

Martin Luther called the Psalms a “little Bible,” claiming that every theme in the larger Bible is contained, in miniature, in this one book.

Athanasius of Alexandria is very likely someone you've never heard of, but is considered one of the greatest of the early church Fathers said: “It is my view that in the words of this book the whole human life, its basic spiritual conduct and as well its occasional movements and thoughts, in comprehended and contained. Nothing to be found in human life is omitted.”

The two books most quoted by Jesus himself (as far as we know from the gospels) and then by the early church in their letters and teachings passed down to us, are Isaiah and Psalms. We cannot talk about the scriptures as Jesus knew them without including Psalms.

The book of Psalms is a collection of poetry and songs in prayer-form – a mini-library of its own. It is the voice both of individuals and of the congregation as a whole. Within it we find praise and supplication and lamentation. We find love and trust and faith, we find joy and gratitude, we find penitence and individual shame, and sometimes we find despair and hope barely, barely held onto. It’s not hard to see why so many, for centuries, have read this mini-library as the story of the human condition.

Though they have traditionally been attributed to David, the shepherd-boy-become-king; the reality is that we don’t know which individuals wrote them or even exactly when they were written. Because it is a collection, the individual psalms were written at different times for different reasons and different occasions -- maybe over dozens or even hundreds of years. In my studies for this message I came across these words by James Luther Mays, a much respected Old Testament scholar and professor at Union Presbyterian Seminary:

[We know that] ... the psalms were in fact written by someone in Hebrew in circumstances and for purposes that belonged to the history of Israel. They are, in the first instance, the religious poetry of a particular community. They come to us a tradition. They are given to us as a means of standing in identity and continuity with the faith of that community. If we read and use them so as to dissolve them completely into our sensibilities and consciousness, they become merely empty vessels of language that we fill with our own meanings. Their value as tradition is lost. They do not lead us and convert us to think and pray and praise as they do.

We can certainly read the psalms today for our own prayer and devotional purposes. We can put words to our own joys and griefs by reading them, or even try to make sense of our own times and cultural settings by reading the psalms. That is entirely legitimate.

But if our purpose is to try to understand how Jesus was taught and shaped by these psalms then we have to strip all the “me” out of our reading, and remove all the cultural connections we make with current events in our world. Otherwise it is all too easy to fall into the error of thinking “Jesus thought just like me,” instead of working for the other direction of us learning to think like Jesus.

The psalms were written in a particular time and place by the Hebrew people of that time. They were a people who saw themselves as the people of God – those in a special relationship with the Creator. This book chronicles what this people believed about God and that relationship, and God’s role in their lives – what God wanted from them and how they responded – and the consequences of their particular responses.

Jesus was also a Hebrew man, one who perhaps felt out of place in his own time, maybe one who felt more connected to the people from past times. At any rate, these people were his people, even at the remove of several hundred years. It can be difficult for us, as Americans, raised in our own tradition of rugged individualism, to understand just what being part of a people meant to the Hebrews. It may even be something we can’t ever quite grasp.

Our reading today was from the very first of the Psalms:

Happy are those who do not follow
the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of God,
and on God's law they meditate
day and night.
They are like trees planted in streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

This has always been at the heart of the Israelites relationship with God – that if the People were true to God, then God would be true to them and all would be well with them.

But if the People were not true, then the results would certainly be different:

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff
that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for God watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

This is what Jesus heard all his life, and this is the promise that undergirded everything he did and believed – everything he taught and passed along to those of us who follow his way to this day:

God watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish...

This, in a nutshell, is the ancient Hebrews’ story. It always has been. It always will be. It is also Jesus’ story. Much of what Jesus would teach and model for us was first taught him through these ancient prayer/poems.

Today it is also our story. And so may it always be.

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GRACE THROUGH THE SCRIPTURES

SOMETIMES YOU GO WITH THE FLOW ...

THEIR STORY / OUR STORY

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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