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Psalm 73
Jesus knew the Psalms. Paul knew the Psalms.
In fact, the entire early Christian community was steeped in the same Psalms that have served as the central prayer and hymnbook for the church since its beginning-until now.
Reading, studying, and praying the Psalms is God’s means for teaching us what it means to be human: how to express our emotions and yearnings, how to reconcile our anger and our compassion, how to see our story in light of God’s sweeping narrative of salvation. Our intent this summer is to help provide the tools for understanding and incorporating these crucial verses into our own lives by exploring 10 hymns from the books of the Psalms.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
My name is Jess. I am a commoner, commons er. I'm actually I'm on the leadership board here and I'm also on the our Canadian conference leadership board for our denomination. And I've been a little incognito over the past year due to some health issues. So some of you might not know me, might not know my face.
Speaker 1:I'm in the journal if you need to memorize some facial features, but I'm actually just I'm really glad to be here. It's been about a year since I've taught at Commons, so I am I'm just pleased to be with you. This is just a great place. It feels It always feels like home. So with that in mind, before we go any farther this morning, I just wanna take a moment to really settle in to open our our hearts and our spirit to take a deep breath, and just to pray together.
Speaker 1:So pray with me. Creator God, we are here today. All of us for different reasons. All of us with different worlds outside this room, but it truly is an honor to be here with one another to encounter you together. God of goodness, would you help us to be comfortable with wherever we are at today and help us to be comforted in knowing that you are near us and that it is good to be near you.
Speaker 1:You are a good, good father, and we are loved by you. And in the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. So we are spending this summer talking about Psalms. And normally at the beginning of each teaching session on Sundays, we have a little summary of what we talked about last week.
Speaker 1:However, I was not here last week and because it is hot out and people are on vacation and it's summertime and everything goes out the window, we're actually not up to date on the podcast so I have no idea what happened last week. I will not be giving you a summary. Hashtag sorry but not sorry. So, our Psalms. I have always been very fascinated by the book of Psalms.
Speaker 1:When I was a kid, in my teenage angst, this was usually the only part of the Old Testament that I could read that didn't confuse me or make me angry. And it's been a pretty consistent part of my life ever since. I love poetry. I really love poetry. And I might not have always liked the words in the Psalms, but I always liked what the poetry said to me.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, we just don't have the right words to express what they're feeling, and it's really comforting to have someone sort of name your emotions for you and help you process through them, whether they're happy or sad. And there's something beautiful when we engage in that kind of liturgy together. It's actually one of the reasons that I've always been drawn to Catholicism. My in laws are actually Catholic, and my husband's mom has said numerous times that for her, there is a lot of comfort in the recitation of a familiar prayer. It's really grounding for her.
Speaker 1:And at Commons, some of the ways that we worship as community is through reading and responses. Sometimes it's from the book of prayer, which is actually one of my favorites. Or like today, we say the Apostles' Creed together. We sing hymns that have been sung for generations. And it really stirs something in me.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you. All of us together, echoing words that have been said years before. And the the artist, the visual creative person in me likes to think of all of these vibrations being sent out of our mouths and finding other vibrations of similar a similar context and the same kind of words and somewhere existing out in the universe and forming this beautiful choir together over history. It's it's timeless. And the Psalms really provide something that is familiar and comforting for what the human condition has always been.
Speaker 1:Even if we're reading them alone, there is this sense of history and of community. I was challenged a couple of years ago to actually read the book of Psalms like a prayer book. And I happened to stumble upon Psalm 88, which if you've read is pretty heavy. It's a really dark Psalm. I was feeling really desperate and I was lonely and afraid.
Speaker 1:And I remember opening up to Psalm 88 and just feeling like somebody knew what I was going through. Somebody was speaking my insides for me. And I actually connected to a bible in a way that I had never had before. I had always wrestled with the text, but I had never wept over it. Not like that.
Speaker 1:And today, we are not talking about Psalm 88. We're actually talking about Psalm 73. Psych. And perhaps it's not as dark, but there is a lot to do when we look at this Psalm. So let's let's get started.
Speaker 1:Psalm 73, a Psalm of Asaph. Surely God is good to Israel to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped. I nearly lost my foothold for I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles.
Speaker 1:Their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from common human burdens. They're not plagued by human ills. Therefore, pride is their necklace. They clothe themselves with violence, and from their callous hearts come iniquity.
Speaker 1:Their evil imaginations have no limits. They scoff and speak with malice. With arrogance, they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore, their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.
Speaker 1:They say, how would God know? Does the most high know anything? This is what the wicked are like. Always free of care, they go on amassing wealth. And surely, in vain, I have kept my heart pure, and I have washed my hands in innocence.
Speaker 1:All day long, I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments. If I had spoken out like that, I would have betrayed your children. When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I encountered the sanctuary of God. Then, I understood their final destiny. Surely, you placed them on slippery ground, you cast them down to ruin.
Speaker 1:How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors? They are like a dream when one awakes. When you rise, Lord, you will despise them as fantasies. When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant. I was a brute beast before you.
Speaker 1:Yet, I am always with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
Speaker 1:Those who are far from you will perish. You destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge and I will tell of all your deeds. So because the psalm is a little bit shorter, it made sense for me to just sort of read the whole thing.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about the author. So a man named Asaph and I it it's Asaph, but I'm gonna say Asaph because that's how I practiced it all week. So he's actually credited with writing Psalm 73. And we actually know a little bit about him as well. He belonged to the tribe and the tradition of Levi.
Speaker 1:So he would be a Levite. He would be a priest, a holy man. He would have been a teacher of God's divine law, but it's unique to him that he was actually specifically chosen to be a musician. And he actually ended up being one of the music leaders and his instrument was the symbol. Now, initially when I read this, I was picturing like the person in the back with the triangle, just sort of like that one grand sound.
Speaker 1:But he actually started this lineage of cymbal players, and there's something really neat about this instrument. Apparently, these cymbals were tonal, So they would strike different notes. And each note would correspond each note of the scale would correspond with a different Hebrew letter. So there are some music theorists that actually suggest that the symbols were designed to strike notes that corresponded with the spelling of God's name. So four Hebrew letters, four different notes.
Speaker 1:They were actually able to play God's name musically. And when the the tones of the symbol were sounded, they would be the starting notes for the community worship. So this was a man who was well known, well respected in the community. He was a leader, a teacher, had a worshipful heart, and he could play the name of God. That's a challenge to Kevin.
Speaker 1:If he can come up with a way to play the name of God next Sunday, that would be great. So let's do a really quick summary and overview of some of the the Psalms that we just read. So verse one articulates the covenant faith. God is good to Israel, to the pure in heart. And this is probably less of a national identity thing and more of a declaration of the kind of people that Israel is.
Speaker 1:They're pure in heart, good in heart. In verse two, the writer says that his feet almost slit. He's actually declaring that he nearly had a crisis of faith. In verse four, we see the writer change tenses. Initially, he's writing in the past.
Speaker 1:He's letting us know that this is his story. And then the tense actually changes to the present. And this really intensifies the story that he's telling. It brings us right into the middle of his turmoil. It allows us to sympathize and empathize with him and there's an opportunity to pray the psalm maybe in the middle of our own frustration as we identify with it.
Speaker 1:The writer also says that the wicked, they have no struggles. And the word struggles here is actually meaning that they have no bonds or change. They literally have nothing holding them back. They have every opportunity in front of them. And then this section from verse four to verse 12, the writer laments at how much good the wicked have.
Speaker 1:They have no regard for God and yet they have everything that they want. Verse thirteen and fourteen, all of the emotions in the sum really come to a head. The writer is angry, he's broken hearted, he's done all the right things and it doesn't do him any good. And in Eugene Peterson's message version, he translates it this way. I've been stupid to play by the rules.
Speaker 1:What has it gotten me? A long run of bad luck, that's what. A slap in the face every time I walk out the door. And then in verse 15, there's a drastic change in the psalm. This is where things really start to change.
Speaker 1:First of all, the writer makes it clear that he didn't actually say any of this out loud. This was an internal struggle. It's And not because it's unacceptable to lament out loud. It's actually a character thing for him. He's in leadership.
Speaker 1:And if he had lost his faith, other people might have lost their faith as well. He didn't want that. This was his struggle. He also explains that his attempt to reason this whole dilemma out didn't help. It just gave him a headache.
Speaker 1:And that's when he goes into the temple, into the sanctuary, the dwelling place of God where he is changed. He worships. He encounters God. Verse 15 is a it's a changing point for him moving forward. He becomes a different person.
Speaker 1:Peterson translates it this way, I saw the whole picture, the bigger picture. In verse 21, the writer talks about his former state of heaviness and and the bitterness that he was hanging on to and how ignorant he had been and how much it's in changed since his encounter with God in the sanctuary. He remembers his maker and how good it is to be near him, how sweet his presence is. He's reminded of his purpose in life. And then the Psalm can concludes with a reminder that we are meant to be changed by God and not to be quiet about it.
Speaker 1:So there are some key players in this psalm that we really need to talk about. First of all, this is our everyone's favorite topic. Who's the wicked in this psalm? The psalmist is really talking about two groups of people. He is talking about the people with good hearts and the wicked.
Speaker 1:We don't like to talk about the wicked people, not in church. And we probably, if we were reading this, we might even skip over and say, well, that's that's somebody else. We don't really need to worry about the wicked because that was the old covenant and now things are different. However, there's this group of people that actually causes the psalmist to have a near crisis of faith. And so it's actually really important to the psalm.
Speaker 1:We need to pay attention to it. So the the writer, you can actually translate the wicked as as evil or unrighteous. But another way to understand this is those who violate the standard. Those who are legally not innocent. We know that in the Jewish tradition, the law is life.
Speaker 1:It was the means by which God's chosen people were set apart from the rest of the world. It was the part of the covenant, the relationship between God and Israel. And those who violated the standard were not only not Jewish, they didn't know God and they didn't honor the covenant. So there's no evidence of a relationship here. However, the wicked are not the problem.
Speaker 1:The problem is the prosperity of the wicked. And the pros the word for prosperity here is actually shalom. We've talked about this before. Shalom isn't just peace, it's completeness, it's wholeness, it's soundness, it's the ability to thrive. And this is the sentiment that God uses when he makes the covenant with Israel that the nation will thrive, it will be blessed.
Speaker 1:And now, the writer sees that the life that God has sort of promised to Israel is actually being lived out by people who don't even know God. Let alone understand the value of Shalom and keeping covenant with him. He's envious. It's not fair. You can actually hear him.
Speaker 1:I kept my heart pure. I'm totally clean. I'm doing everything right. And where's the justice? I have done everything you've asked me to.
Speaker 1:I've followed. I've been faithful. I should be living that life. These people don't know what it means to live in covenant. They're self reliant and independent.
Speaker 1:They don't even need God. They take care of themselves and it's working for them. The psalmist is not condemning the way the wicked live. Just that their way of living isn't supposed to be life giving. And so he doubts.
Speaker 1:He doubts the covenant whether the promise is any good. After all, he's the one who's condemned and suffering now. He's the one who has followed the rules who fulfilled his part of the covenant and for what? So there's this kind of prosperity gospel mentality thing happening here. Right?
Speaker 1:If we are good enough, if we do the right things, if we do enough of the right things, if we are enough, we'll get what we want. We'll be happy. After all, we deserve good things. This is actually something we hear in our culture a lot, isn't it? You deserve to be happy.
Speaker 1:But loving God and being people with pure hearts does not mean that we get a free pass on the painful things of this life. It doesn't mean that we'll always be happy or that optimism will be enough or that our faith will be strong enough to guide us through difficult times. The reality is many of us, I would guess most of us, have or are or will experience something that causes us to wonder, is the Christian life worth living? Does the struggle of a disciplined life pay off? Is it worth praying to a God that is sometimes silent?
Speaker 1:Is it worth it to maintain abstinence or sobriety or generosity when it makes us look like prudes? For Asaf, there is a deeper pain here. It's this pain of injustice. We see injustice everywhere. And as followers of Jesus, we're called to action not just to see injustice and do nothing but to engage.
Speaker 1:We're called to love instead of hate and to befriend the lonely, to care for the orphan, the widowed, we know all of this. But we can't always fix things. Sometimes it really is out of our hands and we feel really defeated by that. We run out of optimism or energy or passion, and we're left feeling empty with this unanswerable question, why is this happening? It's really hard not to get stuck there in just questioning the why of it all.
Speaker 1:We're good people. We have good hearts. We just wanna know the reason why. Maybe you are facing unemployment or you're deep in a financial hole. You feel maybe like you haven't been living up to your potential or there's a struggle with addiction or illness or broken relationships or death or loss.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of things that cause us to question why. It really stings though when we're trying to live the best life we can, when we're trying to be honest and transparent, to listen to God, to learn about God's imagination, to be an active participant in that process. And it feels like we get slapped in the face every time we walked out the door. Asaf gets that. He is This isn't his first rodeo.
Speaker 1:He's not a new believer. He's a seasoned leader in the community. In the first part of the psalm, the psalmist is actually struggling with his theodicy. It doesn't make sense. We've asked those questions.
Speaker 1:Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there injustice? There are many, many brilliant thinkers, philosophers, theologians who have tried to answer this question sufficiently. And sometimes, we do find an answer that works for a while until we experience another crisis. Doubt's not a bad thing.
Speaker 1:It's not wrong to doubt. It's part of the journey. It's an essential part of the journey, actually. It can't be solved with platitudes and plucky sayings. It's difficult and awkward and often really lonely.
Speaker 1:And maybe it takes us a long time to try and sort out, but it isn't the place that we're meant to stay. It's not something we're meant to be afraid of. We can sort of recognize here that doubt is actually part of our faith. So tomorrow is my one year anniversary. Yeah.
Speaker 1:John and I got married one year ago tomorrow. And five five weeks after that, I got sick and I didn't get better. And maybe I will, but my life is very different now, very different than it was a year ago. A lot of really tough things happened. I couldn't work, and I couldn't study.
Speaker 1:Some days, I couldn't walk. My brain didn't work the same. A lot of good things happened too. We built a home. Together, we got a dog.
Speaker 1:We ended up having to slow our life way down. We found joy in living with less and we built stronger relationships with people around us. And there are many days when I am happy. There are many days when I am frustrated, and I'm hurting, and I'm very tired, and I'm sad, and I'm lonely, and my faith is just shaky. We talk about faith and doubt in this very intellectual way.
Speaker 1:And eventually, conversation kinda comes to a halt, least it does for me. I I find it hard to articulate. I can't really explain it. I just know that it's something that I can feel. And I wonder if faith and doubt in all of our intellectual conversation about them are actually matters of the heart.
Speaker 1:So sometimes I think we need a medium, this way to step out of the realm of logic, something that speaks to us in the language of the heart. Walter Brueggemann talks about the orientation and the disorientation and the reorientation of processing through the psalms. It's like art. It allows us to see things clearly and at the same time totally differently. We we need art.
Speaker 1:We need the rhythm and the poetry. A place of understanding without necessarily analysis. A place of expression without explanation, a place where things cause us to dance or to burn or to weep or just to stand in silence. This psalm like many is this culmination of prayer and doubt and faith and art. It it allows us to be exactly who we are similar to worship.
Speaker 1:Us being who we are and God being who he is. So when the psalmist enters the sanctuary he goes to worship and something happens there. He's changed. He sees things differently. He sees things clearly because he encounters a God who absolutely loves him.
Speaker 1:He sees God for who he really is and that transforms him. His heart is renewed. His imagination is reawakened and he yields his entire existence to this intimate embrace of the divine and he sits in the living room of the living God. The injustice that caused his doubt is not the end of his faith. It is the prompt that brings him to the place where God is so he can fully express his humanity before a fully present and fully divine God.
Speaker 1:So let's talk a little bit about this place of God. In the ancient tradition, the sanctuary was the place that God inhabited. This was the holy place. It was God's house. And it's interesting in it, isn't it, how how much we can tell about a person by what their house looks like.
Speaker 1:Their very personal space. Have you ever house set for somebody before and you just maybe you've never met this person, but you get a sense of exactly who they are because of the things that they put on display or how they organize their cupboards or whether or not they recycle. I have this really bad habit of exploring when I go to other people's houses. You might call it snooping. I call it exploring.
Speaker 1:I just want to open the cupboards and look in the drawers and see what's going on there. And those of you who have never invited me to your house are like, we're never inviting her over. And those of you who have are like, oh my gosh, what does she know? What has she seen? And I promise I will never tell.
Speaker 1:But I understand if I never get an invitation. So the space that we occupy actually reflects who we are, whether we like it or not. So what comes to mind when you think of the place of God? When I was little, one of my favorite games to play, every little girl's favorite game to play, was to take all of my favoritest and prettiest things and set them up in a brand new hideout. I was basically an interior decorating prodigy at like the age of six.
Speaker 1:I just liked to be surrounded by beauty. And when I think of the place of God, I think of beauty. I think of the vastness of space and the reverence of museums, and I also think of the clutter of pictures on my mom's fridge and the acoustics of a cathedral and the smell of summer and the warmth of a grandmother's sitting room. The the sanctuary that the writer is talking about is the sacred place of worship. And worship for the Israelites was this reenactment of the faith story, the creation, exodus, the silence of God, the redemption, the covenant and we get to participate in that today.
Speaker 1:For each generation, worship tells the story of who we are and who God is. It brings the past into the present and it gives us an opportunity to engage with the whole Christian story, the timelessness of God and the hope that we hang on to as the worship points us to a future that we have in the divine imagination. The place of worship now, our sanctuary today is you, the church. You are God's sanctuary. You are the place of God.
Speaker 1:And through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the spirit of God dwells in us. We are the sanctuary of God. It's true that as Christians we are meant to live differently. We are motivated by the love of God to love Christ. There is a differentness like Israel who was chosen and set apart.
Speaker 1:This is how we get to be part of recreating the world. This is how love wins. The love from God and for God and from each other and for each other. Just as the ever present ever coming kingdom of God brings everyone to the banqueting table, the place where everyone is welcome and known and free where there is good food and long tables and laughter and peace and I suspect many many children, which means many many foods on the floor. And there is mess and it's noisy, but there is no injustice or loneliness or depression or hurting or pain.
Speaker 1:The place that Jesus said in Luke seventeen twenty one was in the middle of you. The beauty of being a community, of being inclusive, not always perfect, but embodying the imagination and the hope and the love of Jesus and being Christ incarnate. We see the bigger picture. We can't always think through our emotions. Sometimes, they are best served expressed.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, after the writer expresses, after he worships, he almost laughs at his previous feelings. He basically chastises himself. And it's true that once we get a hold of the bigger picture, our perspectives change and we wonder how we could think the way we thought in the first place. The psalm demonstrates how to embrace exactly what we feel without trying to change it. We are privileged actually to be human, to recognize the transformation that occurs in the presence of God.
Speaker 1:Not because what we feel is wrong and needs to be changed. We are inspired to let it go when we get a hold of the bigger picture. Grounded in the grand story of God and engaged in a vision of a beautiful world. And we know how good it is to be near him. It's what we want in those desperate moments when we cry out, when we hope that someone is listening, when we're upset because of the injustice, because of the hurt, because of the pain.
Speaker 1:We cry out for someone to make it right, to explain why this is happening. The writer remembers that he just wants to be near God. Injustice is a part of our world and pain changes us. It changes those who are hurting and those who are caring for the hurting, and we will never get used to it. The writer gets that.
Speaker 1:He's tempted to throw everything away that his life is built upon, living the way that God's told him to because it's not paying off. But it's because of what he has built his life on that enables him to hold on. He lives in a covenant relationship with a God who knows him, who knows Israel, who's chosen them, who loves them, and who has made a promise to walk with them. To be their God and they his people, it's fundamental to the writer's identity. It's who he is.
Speaker 1:And covenant promises communion, promises community. And so the writer draws near to God and as God draws near to him and the scope of his vision shifts and he's changed. Maybe some of us are unfamiliar with the nearness of God. But maybe some of us feel like worship is a risk. Being near God evokes feelings of anxiety or inadequacy.
Speaker 1:Maybe we feel foolish chasing after an entity that is indifferent to us, that doesn't do anything for us. Maybe we see injustice in the world as God's doing it and we don't want to sit in a place with a God who could allow those things to happen. And perhaps it's just been a while since you've been near him. Brueggemann reminds us in these Psalms, Israel moves from articulation of hurt and anger to submission of them to God. And then finally, relinquishment.
Speaker 1:And only when there is relinquishment can there be praise and acts of generosity. It reminds us that we're not meant to stay in the dark places. We don't need to be afraid of the shadows, but we're not meant to stay there. The Psalms are a really incredible gift to us. And maybe you've never read them as a prayer book or maybe you need to revisit that idea.
Speaker 1:But let me pray this over us today. May our curiosity bring us to the place of God. May the beauty of the Psalms inspire us to orient and disorient and reorient ourselves. May we encounter the sanctuary, the place of God as we encounter one another. May we know the sweetness of what it is to be near him, and may we be changed by it inside and out.
Speaker 1:And may we all love God, love people, and tell the story.