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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.
Welcome. My name is Jerry. Most of you have had a chance to meet me before. Appreciate that. But up here on the stage with me this morning is someone you haven't had a chance to meet yet, and that is Bobby who is joining our team as our staff this year.
Speaker 1:Now, yeah, give her a round of applause right off the start.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:And then you can decide if she deserves that again at the end today, but that's alright. We have Bobby joining us. She starts today. Scott and his wife Darlene and kids, they'll be here next week, and so you'll be meeting them as well on our team. So really excited about this especially as we head into the fall.
Speaker 1:But we wanted to set Bobby off on the right foot, and so we thought, why not just throw her into the deep end and have her teach on her very first Sunday here. So Bobby's gonna be teaching this morning. She's gonna pick up our last psalm for the summer. But I wanted to ask her a couple questions just so that you could get to know her at least a little bit before you listen to her preach. So first of all, you're fairly new to Calgary.
Speaker 1:You've been here about six months. How did you end up here?
Speaker 2:Well, I moved to Calgary for love. It's true. But it gets a little bit better. I married the younger brother of three of my friends. So there's a sister, a sister, a sister, a younger brother.
Speaker 2:I married that guy just in January. Great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you've been a pastor. Yeah. You've had this career for a different time, but you've been all over the place. Yeah. So I'm wondering if you can give us a bit of a background on some of the traditions you've been a part part of, where you studied, and and some of the places that you've pastored before you ended up here at Commons.
Speaker 2:Great. So I'm gonna back it way up to the beginning. I grew up in Saskatchewan in a small town.
Speaker 1:Few Rough Rider fans here apparently.
Speaker 2:I can't even
Speaker 1:Quiet Rough Rider fans. Yeah. I
Speaker 2:grew up going to a Catholic church. It's a small little parish with my family. And then in high school, my parents went to a Pentecostal church. So you can imagine that was a little bit shocking for me. And then I went to Bible College in Saskatchewan, so I was trying to kind of find my own middle way there.
Speaker 2:After that, I moved to California, and I worked at a Presbyterian church in The Bay Area for a few years. I'd never lived in a city and moved to the Bay Area, so that was huge. And after that, I moved up to the Lower Mainland where I worked at a Mennonite church with young people mostly. And then I work some of you are maybe doing the math. Like, how old is she?
Speaker 2:And then I worked at a little Baptist church in Vancouver and was there for seven years. While there, I got my MDiv from Regent College out on the UBC campus and got ordained.
Speaker 1:Alright.
Speaker 2:Now I'm here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so now you're here. You're in Calgary. You've been here for a bit. What is your favorite thing that you have discovered about the city in Calgary? Other than that the weather is exactly the same as Yes.
Speaker 1:Vancouver, apparently.
Speaker 2:I don't know what you guys are complaining about. I think that the most surprising thing for me is that I really like it. I had some resistance. I was a little resistant to to the idea of moving to Calgary, but I had this really neat experience where I was biking home from my workplace in Vancouver, and I was thinking about lots of things, and then something shifted in me. And I knew I am gonna move to Calgary, and I have loved it.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, maybe I haven't met you, but thanks for making a city amazing.
Speaker 1:Alright. So Bobby started this week. She was able to ride her bike, to work this week here in Calgary as well, so that's exciting. So this is her chance to get to know you a little bit and talk to you. Please, after the service, come say hi, give her a hug, welcome her to commons, but I will give her the stage and have her teach this morning on Psalm one thirty nine.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Have fun.
Speaker 2:So again, my name is Bobby, and this has been a really big week for me. I stepped into this new role as one of your pastors, which I am thrilled about, like, over the moon thrilled about. And, yeah, it's the beginning of our journey together. And with that beginning, this week, I attended my very first common staff meeting which was so great I have to say that the staff here are lovely, they are smart, they are gifted and did I say funny already? They're funny.
Speaker 2:I also met the board for the first time and also such a fabulous group of humans who really love this community. And finally, I prepared this sermon for you and also for me, for our church. I am so sure this is gonna work. Yes. Like many of you, I'm sure, when I started something new when I start something new, I wonder, are these people going to like me?
Speaker 2:Is this a place where I'll be known? Whether it's starting a new job or launching your kids into a new school year or stepping on the doorstep of year three here at Commons Church, The need to be known, to not be invisible, to not be misread is a really important part of the human journey. Today in our worship, together we will consider Psalm one thirty nine. And in my newbie status, I have the rather unique honor of wrapping up the entire summer Psalm series. While many of the other Psalms in the whole book are about searching for God, Psalm one thirty nine is a unique look at God's search for man.
Speaker 2:I also wanna say about that that, when I say man, I mean all people, not just the dudes. This prayer invites us to open our hearts to all of life and to find that in all of life, God is there loving us. But before I read Psalm one thirty nine, yes, in its entirety, I warn you it is a little long, I want you to listen for two things. The first one is this, listen for the deeply personal tone of the Psalm. Repetitions of personal pronouns, I, my, me.
Speaker 2:The second thing is this, listen for moments when the poet maxes out his imagination, where he hits a wall of expression, where words fail him. If it were written in the language of today, I think it might sound a little bit more like this. I just I can't even. I I can't. I just I can't even.
Speaker 2:So again, you're listening for personal pronouns, and you're listening for that maxed out expression. Here it is. You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar.
Speaker 2:You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you Lord know it completely. You hem me in behind and before and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
Speaker 2:Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me.
Speaker 2:Your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you. The night will shine like the day for darkness is as light to you. For you created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb.
Speaker 2:I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body.
Speaker 2:All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, God. How vast is the sum of them? Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.
Speaker 2:If only you, God, would slay the wicked. Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty. They speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
Speaker 2:I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies. Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.
Speaker 2:Let's pray. Living God of our past, present, and future, You pursue us with your love. Draw us into what that means for each one of us today by your spirit and in the name of Christ, our guiding shepherd, we pray. Amen. One of the things that helped me get my bearings when I first moved to Calgary, your fabulous city, was going up in the Calgary Tower and opting for the audio guide tour.
Speaker 2:Any other lovers of audio guide tours in the room? None of them? No one? Thank you. Some of the nerds are in the room.
Speaker 2:In the tour, I learned about, of course, the construction of the tower, the Wild West stories of the city, and my favorite part, the landmarks and the neighborhoods of Calgary. It was such a great thing for a new Calgarian to do, one who is not amazing with direction. I got myself above the city, and I sorted myself out. This is how I want us to start with the Psalm, just to get above the ground of it, to survey the context of not only Psalm one thirty nine, but all the psalms. The book of Psalms is in its current curated form because this is how the Jewish people who survived the Babylonian captivity shaped it.
Speaker 2:This post exilic community had been through the hardest of hard times. The besiege of their city, the sacking of the temple, and the long hike away from home to start all over again in the land of their oppressors. Their response was to pull together the songs and the stories, to sing them and to tell them and to pass them along. Here's why I think that matters. Walter Bruggemann writes that these last psalms in the collection, so it's in book five where we find Psalm one thirty nine, These Psalms are connected to the aftermath of exile.
Speaker 2:These are not songs sung on the sunniest of days. These are the prayers of a nation prayed through hard uncertain times. Yes, sometimes joyful but also terrifying. These are the prayers of people almost always struggling under the weight of their own faithlessness and shame. We'll see in Psalm one thirty nine that while the writer can't know the infinite thoughts of God, the very act of just reaching for them is a powerful guide.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna say that again. We'll see that through Psalm one thirty nine, while the writer cannot know the infinite thoughts of God, the very act of just reaching for them is a powerful guide. So this brings me to the place where I find surprising amounts of guidance in my life, podcasts and public radio. On a Sunday this past spring, I was driving to church, and this was not a church I was working at because I took a little break. I had this novel experience through the power of radio.
Speaker 2:I had one of those moments where the stories of other people reach across great distances to drop beautiful and life affirming gems right into my heart. I was listening to CBC Radio One, the host of the Sunday edition, Michael Enright, was introducing the story of Viktor Frankl and the power of Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. What Enright did so brilliantly was he interviewed a diverse group of people who spoke about how the needs in their own lives crossed paths with the work of Frankel's life. Guests included a young woman named Stephanie who was a survivor of cancer, Mohamed Fahmi, the Egyptian born Canadian journalist who was held in Cairo's Scorpion Prison for over four hundred days and even Chris Martin of Coldplay who spoke very eloquently of how man's search for meaning helped him in a difficult time. But none of these stories compare to the story of Frankl himself.
Speaker 2:Viktor Frankl survived four Nazi concentration camps. His first wife, Tilly, and their unborn child died in Bergen Belsen. His brother and his parents also died in concentration camps. This left Frankel alone after his release in 1946. That same year, he wrote his memoir and manifesto on human psychology called Man's Search for Meaning.
Speaker 2:Now, we could talk for days and days about man's search for meaning. I just read it for the first time this week. But for the purposes of today, I want to draw you to the thesis of the book as talked about by the guests on Enwright's show. Frankl says our search for meaning should be found outside of ourselves. This is not an abstract search, but a mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment.
Speaker 2:For Frankl, it was putting into the world his work on human psychology, something he had started before the war but finished only after his release. In the book, writes more than once about being fond of Nietzsche's words and they are this, he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. That's what Psalm one thirty nine is offering us. A why with which a why which can help us with any how. The poet of Psalm one thirty nine flips the script.
Speaker 2:Rather than write about his search for God, he writes about God's search for him. Word picture after word picture, he writes about a God who is found right here in all the highs and the lows of life, in the ecstasy and the agony of being human. And to our surprise, even when we think we're running away from God, even if our hearts have traces of hatred, God is right there searching for us anyway. So let's hear more about this search now. We're going to step back in to Psalm one thirty nine and trace three attempts of what it's like to be known by God.
Speaker 2:The first trace of God's thoughts are found in God's searching. This is what the searching sounds like. I set. I rise. You are there.
Speaker 2:I think. I'm about to speak. You are there. I move forward and backward, up and down. You are there.
Speaker 2:You are shaping me. You are laying your hand of blessing on me. And then he hits that wall. Such knowledge. It's too wonderful for me.
Speaker 2:I just I can't. I can't even. It's too lofty. It's too high. It's too much for me to attain.
Speaker 2:But then he starts back up again. He finds new beats to express what my husband so cleverly called God's spiriting. The author launches into soaring metaphor using language of poetic opposites and what Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew literature at UC Berkeley calls semantic momentum. A building, a moving forward, a deepening of thought. Where can I go from your spirit?
Speaker 2:Because sometimes my impulse, it's to hide from you, God. If I soar to the heavens, you are there. If I sink down into the underworld, you are there. When I fly up on the wings of the naan and swoop down to the depths of the sea, you are there. The writer pushes this spiriting even further into darker places, going as far as to say, even when I'm wrapped in several layers of the darkest of dark, you make an impossible thing possible.
Speaker 2:You illuminate. The final movement of God searching for man is traced in God's making. The psalmist moves from the expansiveness of the creator's presence to the intricacies of being created. Now these next verses, 13 to 18, they're what I like to call the bedroom psalm. It's definitely not PG rated anymore.
Speaker 2:These verses, they're about flesh and they are about body. You created my innermost parts. You wove me together in my mother's womb. You knew my shape when it was being made in the secret place. Wink.
Speaker 2:Wink. You know you knew my body before I even stepped into it. I mean, that's the stuff right there. But let me take a little break and offer you an alternative translation of verse 17. Sounds fun.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. We usually read how precious to me are your thoughts, god. But even if it's just for for today, just for this moment, let's go with the alternative which is often written in the little footnote in your own bible down at the bottom of the page. How amazing are your thoughts concerning me?
Speaker 2:Or as the New Living Translation reads, how precious are your thoughts about me, oh God, They cannot be numbered. This is wondrous. Moving on to verse 18, the poet maxes out on how far he can take his own expressions. This is like a dream, but I wake up and you're right there. And it's not a dream at all.
Speaker 2:It's real life. The author of Psalm one thirty nine can't grasp the fullness of how God knows him. He's trying to figure it out by tracing God's searching, God's spiriting, God's making. In sum, what a creation. What a creator.
Speaker 2:Liz Gilbert, in her book on creativity, tells a really cool story about her friend, doctor Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of botany. In a chapter titled, Does It Love You? She tells this story. And for your information, I'm basically going to read the chapter to you because I feel like Liz and I are good buddies, and she would like that. We're not.
Speaker 2:But also, she just did a much better job writing it than I could summarize it. So here it is. Robin's students are all fervent young environmentalists, earnest as can be, desperate to save the world. Before oh, sorry. Before they can get down to the business of world saving though, Robin often asks her students these two questions.
Speaker 2:The first is this, do you love nature? Every hand in the room goes up. The second question is, do you believe that nature loves you in return? Every hand in the room goes down. At which point, Robin says, then we have a problem already.
Speaker 2:The problem is this. These earnest young world savers honestly believe that the living earth is indifferent to them. They believe that humans are nothing but passive consumers and that our presence on Earth is only a destructive force. Ancient people did not see it this way, needless to say. Our ancestors always operated with a sense of being in a reciprocal, emotional relationship with the physical surroundings.
Speaker 2:Whether whether they felt that they were being rewarded by mother nature or punished by her, At least, they were engaged in constant conversation with her. Robin believes that modern people have lost their sense of conversation, lost the awareness of the earth communicating with us as we are communicating with it. Just a little Bobby break right there. We could just as easily be talking about our relationship with God here. Back to Liz.
Speaker 2:Wrapping it up, she says, without the sense of relationship, Robin warns her students they are missing out on something incredibly important. They are missing out on the potential of being co creators in life. Liz is saying that even the created world loves us back. If it's true of the created, imagine how much more true it is of the creator. But before we conclude this journey of the Psalms, I'd like to drive out of the city limits of Psalm one thirty nine and head down the bumpier gravel road of verses 19 to 22.
Speaker 2:These are those hate verses. Slay the enemies. Hate those who hate you. This road, one commentator notes, is wholly biblical in its realism. And it is.
Speaker 2:Right? We can't get very far in our bibles without tripping over some really violent stuff. So we don't skip these verses. If we do, then we can't bring the violence of our own hearts, of our own lives, or the world to this text. We face these verses and consider what is really going on here.
Speaker 2:For the poets and the curators of the Psalms, the enemies of Israel are the enemies of God. For them, it's same same. We can't erase that that was their experience. This was how they understood the world, full of powerful, oppressive empires and a little more eye for an eye. Anyone who threatened them in their minds was a threat to God, vice versa.
Speaker 2:Still, these verses offer us more than history. They underscore that as human beings, we struggle not only with the impulse to hide but also with the impulse to hate. Sometimes that hatred can be directed at God or others, but often for us, I wonder, is it rooted more in hatred for ourselves? We trace this self hatred in regrets, in guilt, in disappointments, in the secrets, in our stories that caused us or someone that we love incredible pain. The point of all this is not to hide away from being known though.
Speaker 2:It's not to get stuck in self hatred. Even the writer of these verses does not do that. After his exhausting search to comprehend God's knowledge of him, the poet goes back to where he started, praying that God would search his own heart even more. Sitting where we sit today, we can stretch out this story to the coming of Christ, God's ultimate search for us. Jesus shows us a new way to deal with our hiding and our hatred.
Speaker 2:He faces it. Dying at the hands of enemies, he transforms hatred into love, death into life. This is the love the poet of Psalm one thirty nine is trying so hard to know. I used to think Psalm one thirty nine was about God's friendship, But now I don't see a friend. I see a lover, a perfect, passionate, long suffering lover.
Speaker 2:And the response to love like this is to turn towards it, to open wide our hearts, to make ourselves vulnerable, to ask for more. Yes. This psalm is about crashing into the limits of the knowledge of God, But that is okay because it reminds us that long before we had any say in the matter, God set out to search for us. And as far as I know, that plan is still in effect. So on the doorstep of year three, here at Commons Church, in this September full of new beginnings, Let's join with the psalmist and pray these words together.
Speaker 2:And I'd like you to read them out loud with me. They're from the message which is just kind of refreshing and then I'll close in prayer. Altogether, investigate my life, oh God. Find out everything about me. Get a clear picture of what I'm about.
Speaker 2:See for yourself whether I've done anything wrong, then guide me in the road to eternal life. Loving God, you lead us in the way everlasting. Let us, like Victor Frankl wrote, be alert to the meaning of life outside of ourselves. Let us, like Liz Gilbert reminds us, see that even before we love you, you love us. As Christ followers, we look to meet you, Jesus, in all the light and the dark details of life.
Speaker 2:By the gentle and constant guidance of your spirit, we pray. Amen. So just before I release you into your worlds, I wanna remind you that next Sunday is launch Sunday, which Kevin tells me is a really big party. So I hope that you will join us to celebrate the kickoff of this new year, year three. Before you go, make sure you make a connection, which is like an exercise of being ready for next Sunday to open wide our hearts to one another.
Speaker 2:And finally, I'm delighted to offer you the benediction of this community, which is love God, love people, tell the story.