In Psalm-niacs

Ever have trouble sleeping? I don’t. Whenever my head hits the pillow I am pretty much out. Yet it is a problem that affects countless Americans, and it has a terrible aspect to it. The more you get into a cycle of sleeplessness, the more you are tired and in need of sleep and the less a true insomniac is able to sleep.

In Psalm 77 the Psalmist speaks of his inability to sleep. In verse 3 he talks about how he lay awake at night as anxiety tormented him. Sleep specialists today blame anxiety as the number one villain in sufferers of insomnia. Those affected find their minds spinning like little computer hard drives unable to “sleep”. (Sad that I have to use a computer analogy to talk about something as uniquely human as sleep.) In many cases the worries and concerns of the next day or the happenings of the previous day cause the mind of the insomniac to stick and worry and sleep never comes.

The Psalmist deals with his insomnia by deliberately turning his thoughts to the past and dwelling on what God has done for him and his people. Psychologists today have a name for this. They tell us we need to recall our pasts, and therapy supposedly helps us “reassign new meanings” to the negative happenings there. The Psalmist does this, and in the midst of his sleeplessness finds peace in recalling the wonderful track record that our Lord has with his people. In short, our track record in being faithful to him is pretty sad, but his track record in being faithful to his people is flawless.

Today we talk about Psalm 77 and the art of remembering and how it brings rest to a weary and tired people.

Mark

Psalm 23

I have preached a lot of sermons in my life, but I don’t think I have ever preached one on Psalm 23. That seems sort of odd now that I think about it . . . maybe I have been avoiding it? Maybe I hear it too often so preaching about it seems boring.

Maybe it was because I am afraid of that first part. The Lord is my shepherd, I SHALL NOT WANT. The not wanting part is tough for me, because I still want. I still want stuff in this world like titles and money and a better car and whatever else I know I probably should not want.

Today we will talk about how the Shepherd calls us not to want. Mark

1 The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD
Forever.

(NKJV)

Purity

Last week we talked about morality and instructions on the operation of the human machine. We discussed how with even the simplest of machines there is a truism in operating them…do it wrongly and you may ruin the machine, hurt yourself or hurt someone else.

There are lots of aspects to morality that Christians have stressed over the years. In the old days these aspects were displayed as “virtues” and they were called the Cardinal virtues, the word “cardinal” having nothing to do with Catholic church leaders or baseball players…but with the Latin word cardo meaning “hinge of the door”. They are justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance, and the Psalms are full of calls for us to put these virtues on display.

One very important aspect to being “virtuous” is the combination of prudence and temperance in the English word “purity”. The following are some of the myths the Christian establishment tends to believe about purity:

"I am a Christian because of the things I do not do." (1 Samuel 16:7, Isaiah 64:6)

"Purity and morality is only about what I do sexually." (1 Timothy 4:12, Hebrews 12:16, Acts 5:1-11)

"If I choose to do the purity thing, everything will be 'all good' all at once." (Galatians 6:7)

"God will give me whatever I want, if I just stay pure." (1 John 3:13, John 15:18)

Today we look at Psalm 101 and its call to purity. In Psalm 101 we see purity forms powerful results (1). Purity must flow out of a positive, passionate relationship with God (8), and purity flourishes when practiced rigorously (2). In fact, Psalm 101 calls us to put purity and morality in action and reminds us that practicing private purity precedes public performance.

Today we look at: Purity of the mind – Psalms 101:3

Purity of the heart – Psalms 101:4

Purity of words – Psalms 101:5

Mark

The Psalms and Morality

Recently on one of my trips to Africa I was talking to my roommate who was (and is) a terrific guy, but who does not confess to be a Christian. We were talking about morality, though I don’t think we ever used that term. Ever since Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority, non-Christians tend to get a little antsy about talking “morals” with Christians. None-the-less, we were talking about morals because we were talking about right and wrong. We were talking about how we as humans decide what it means to actually say something is right or wrong, and he offered his opinion that “wrong” actions can be defined as those that in some way harm another person.

I certainly did not disagree…I think that’s a pretty good benchmark for calling something bad… if it hurts another person. It is the social aspect to morality, and it helps us have good relationships with those around us. Indeed without it, there would be mayhem….which was my roommate’s explanation of why people do kind deeds and treat one another well. Yet, as CS Lewis reminds us in his writings, true morality does not allow us to stop there, at least not those of us who call ourselves Christians. As Christians there at least two more aspects or facets to our moral code we think are very important. In addition to “social” morality (how we treat others) there is an internal aspect to morality (how we deal with ourselves) as well as an eternal aspect (how we deal with God).

The Psalms are concerned with all three. The Psalms help us navigate the sea of life by offering wisdom, advice, encouragement and prayer for us to guide our ships. Some teach us how to keep our ships from ramming into others (social). Others tell us to tidy up inside our ships (internal) and others remind us that the life we live is not some random voyage in which we are carried by the wind…but that God built our ships, knows our course and cares where we end up (eternal).

It is interesting that most people in our culture are quite happy to leave the whole morality discussion at the social level. “As long as what I am doing does not hurt anyone, then it’s ok,” they say. Yet we believe that God is concerned about what goes on inside our ships, not because he is a busybody who likes to peek in our windows, but because he built the human machine, and he knows if we do whatever we want, our steering mechanisms will eventually get into such disrepair that we will hurt others and ourselves. He also longs for us to get on course and sail to the destination he desires. Today we look at how the Psalms can shape our morality.

Mark

Psalm 72

The Hebrew Bible uses a wide and varied vocabulary to talk about the poor. The various books of the Old Testament use at least nine terms, each with a slightly different meaning or connotation. The New Testament, using different languages, has a less extensive vocabulary.

So why is it that the language of ancient Hebrew, the language He chose for His people to speak to one another and to praise Him, is so well equipped to talk about the poor? Could it be because the poor are very important to God, and he did not want them dealt with in a broad-brush sort of way?

English has several ways of referring to the poor…at least it has lots of modifiers. We talk of the working class-poor, the poverty line, the dirt poor, the desperately poor… we have ways of differentiating exactly which class of the poor we are referring to. But at the end of the day it seems we fall into a similar trap that the people of Israel fell into…not noticing and caring for the poor.

The twenty verses of Psalm 72 mention the poor nine times. When we think of the poor, we tend to think of their deprivation, but Psalm 72 focuses on their powerlessness instead. Psalm 72 asks God to empower the chief politician of the day, the king, to defend the poor against those who tried to exploit them. Not unlike many places today, the people of means (the haves) corrupted the courts and judicial system through bribery. We see this in the many references to bribery in ancient Israel’s legal, prophetic, and wisdom traditions. The wealthy (the haves) were apparently able to preserve their interests at the expense of the rights of the poor (the have-nots), who (not unlike today) did not have the resources to protect themselves.

As scholar Leslie J. Hoppes says, “Psalm 72 presents the king as the instrument by which God’s justice and righteousness come to the people, especially the poor (vv. 1-2). There is no spiritualization of the poor here. When Psalm 72 speaks about the poor and needy, it is speaking about those people whose lack of material resources makes their exploitation a simple matter for the wealthy.”

Today we look at what the Psalms teach us about the poor and how doing something about it must be part of our faith.

Mark

D-Day . . . A Day of Disorientation for Joe Oleson

On D-day, June 6th 1944, Joe Oleson floated into France in a wooden glider released from high above, descended silently for many minutes, and then parachuted out as he got near the ground. Joe was a radio man, so when he hit the ground in an apple orchard in France, his job was not to shoot anyone but to start sending messages as soon as possible.

Unfortunately for Joe his radio (which, big and heavy, was tethered to him by a long cord) hit the ground a lot harder than expected and was smashed into pieces. After he was able to disentangle himself form the apple tree he landed in, he made it to the radio to see that his accomplishing his main job would not be possible. He went to plan B…which was an infrared sending device strapped to his ankle. These had just been invented, and the new-fangled device for sending Morse code signals to aircraft overhead did not work at all. Joe then moved to plan C…which was…and you won’t believe this… a carrier pigeon that was strapped to his left shoulder. He took out the pigeon, scribbled his coordinates on a piece of paper, and released the bird. The bird, which apparently had been injured when Joe fell out of the tree, flew to the top of the apple tree and just sat there.

I thought of this story this week as we celebrated another anniversary of D-day. There was Joe, sitting there needing to communicate with those above. The radio, the infrared, even the old-school carrier pigeon all failed him as he sat lost and alone in the middle of France. All three were very different ways of communicating based on different situations and scenarios.

The Psalms are similar in some ways--different messages and cries sent to God depending on the situation. Joe could have offered a Psalm of Lament, or one of destruction upon his enemies…and by the time I met him many years later he was offering one of praise that he had survived the whole thing.

Mark

(I got this story from Joe Oleson at the Branson Church of Christ one Sunday night.)

Disoriented? How to Get Re-Oriented

It’s easy to get lost in Washington DC. It shouldn’t be; the city is basically a diamond shape, one big grid with A, B, C streets going one way and 1,2,3 streets the other. Should be simple, but most of us can attest that by the time we make two or three turns and run into yet another diagonal street with a state name (Mass Ave or New York) then the average Joe is completely disoriented.

The good thing is that RE-orientation in DC is only a matter of heading down a lettered street and seeing if the numbers or letters get bigger or smaller. The disorientation process is easy to fall into, but the re-orientation antidote is equally simple.

Walter Brueggemann, one of the authors of the Spiritual Formation Bible some of us have been using, suggests we can categorize the Psalms into three categories: Orientation, Disorientation, Re-orientation. Throughout the years, scholars have not used Brueggemann’s terms, but they have determined that there are groups of psalms that can be classified together because of similarities: Hymns, Individual Laments, Community Laments, Songs of Trust, Individual Thanksgiving Psalms, Royal Psalms, Wisdom Psalms, Pilgrimage Psalms, Liturgy Psalms.

I like Brueggamann’s simple categories because they seem useful in my life. I seem to be in a continual process of knowing what I am doing (oriented . . . these are brief moments;-), which quickly devolves into not knowing what I am doing (disoriented), which hopefully, eventually is solved by a period of re-orientation. It’s true of my driving, my work life, my parenting, my coaching…and perhaps most true of my spiritual walk. The Psalms provide us a way to pray through it all. A guide or map for the lost, a spiritual GPS that maps us from our current lost state and points us toward God. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like something useful.

Mark

Source on Psalms: The ever accurate Wikipedia!

Psalm 67

May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face shine upon us,

Selah

that your ways may be known on earth,
your salvation among all nations.

May the peoples praise you, O God;
may all the peoples praise you.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you rule the peoples justly
and guide the nations of the earth.

Selah

May the peoples praise you, O God;
may all the peoples praise you.

Then the land will yield its harvest,
and God, our God, will bless us.
God will bless us,
and all the ends of the earth will fear him.
(1-7)

Psalm 66

Shout with joy to God, all the earth!
Sing the glory of his name;
make his praise glorious!
Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!
So great is your power
that your enemies cringe before you.
All the earth bows down to you;
they sing praise to you,
they sing praise to your name.” Selah

Come and see what God has done,
how awesome his works in man’s behalf!
He turned the sea into dry land,
they passed through the waters on foot—
come, let us rejoice in him.

Praise our God, O peoples,
let the sound of his praise be heard;
he has preserved our lives
and kept our feet from slipping.

If I had cherished sin in my heart
the Lord would not have listened;
but God has surely listened
and heard my voice in prayer.
Praise be to God
who has not rejected my prayer
or withheld his love from me!
(1-6, 8-9, 18-20)

Psalm 65

Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion;
to you our vows will be fulfilled.
O you who hear prayer,
to you all men will come.
When we were overwhelmed by sins,
you forgave our transgressions.
Blessed are those you choose
and bring near to live in your courts!
We are filled with the good things of your house,
of your holy temple.

You answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness,
O God our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas,
who formed the mountains by your power,
having armed yourself with strength,
who stilled the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
and the turmoil of the nations.
Those living far away fear your wonders;
where morning dawns and evening fades
you call forth songs of joy.
(1-8)