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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.
Everyone. Welcome back. My name is Jeremy. If we haven't met, I haven't been around for a while, and it's great to be back. I've been off for the past few weeks on vacation, and during that time, at a couple of weddings, a couple of funerals, and a couple of flooding incidents here at the church to deal with.
Speaker 1:And yet, honestly, this was probably the best vacation I have had in years, because our team here has just really gelled in a lot of ways this year. And so when I was away, I did not have to think about Sundays at all. Knew everyone would do a fantastic job and they did. So thanks for giving me some space for that. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:And speaking of team, we're really excited because we're gearing up for the start of year three at Commons, start September 11. And as part of that, we actually have some new team members that are joining us here at the church. Now we'll have some more information about that as we get closer to launch. But this year, this is the year we really start preparing for the beginning of the launch of a second parish here in the city. And we also are gonna start working on some options and programs for youth and students and the families that come along with them here at the church as well.
Speaker 1:So we're excited about that. Now, journals are off to the printers this week. You can start to see some of the new signage that's coming in for year three as well. September is going to be great, but we still have a little bit of time to get through in August. And now that I'm back in the office, one of the new projects that is coming up that I need to tell you about is this.
Speaker 1:We are partnering with Habitat for Humanity on a new interfaith build here in the city. So Habitat builds houses for working families that need a bit of help getting set up and into the market, and we're really excited to be a part of that. But as the kickoff for this new interfaith project, they have organized a clergy workday. Now, I know what you're thinking. Clergy workday.
Speaker 1:That's an oxymoron. I mean, it's ridiculous. Right? Look, it's good work if you can get it. But on August 24, if we can raise a thousand dollars to help build a, home for a worthy family, then I will be putting away my latte and my keyboard and I will picking up a hammer and actually attempting to do some manual labor for the day alongside some of the pastors and priests and rabbis and imams from here in the city.
Speaker 1:Now listen, these hands are soft. Trust me. They're smooth. But not only can you help a family get a home this summer, you can help me get some calluses from some honest hard work this summer. So if that's something that's interesting to you, you can mark any donation Habitat through to the end of the month and we will make sure all of that gets to this project.
Speaker 1:I will even try to make sure they get a picture of me just so I can prove that I was there. Now we're in the Psalms this summer. Jess, who taught two weeks ago, is actually taking her show on the road this week. So she is teaching at the Covenant Church in Strathmore, our sister church there. So keep her in your prayers.
Speaker 1:But I have been away, and so I have struggled this week to keep this sermon from running way too long because I just wanted to say, all the things that I could. So let's jump right in, and we're gonna read Psalm seven before we pray. Lord my God, I take refuge in you. Save and deliver me from all who pursue me. Or they will tear me apart like a lion and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me.
Speaker 1:Lord my God, if I have done anything, if I have done this and there is guilt on my hands, if I have repaid my ally with evil or without cause have robbed my foe, then let my enemy pursue me and overtake me. Let him trample my life to the ground and make me sleep in the dirt. Arise Lord in your anger. Rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God.
Speaker 1:Decree justice. Let the assembled peoples gather around you when you sit enthroned over them on high. Let the Lord judge his peoples. Vindicate me, Lord, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity, oh most high. Bring an end to the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure.
Speaker 1:You, the righteous God who probes minds and hearts. For my shield is God most high, who saves the upright in heart. God is a righteous judge. A God who displays his wrath every day. If he does not relent, he will sharpen his sword.
Speaker 1:He will bend and string his bow. He has prepared his deadly weapons. He makes ready his flaming arrows. Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. And whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit they have made.
Speaker 1:The trouble they cause recoils on them and their violence comes down on their own heads. But I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness. I will sing the praises of the name of the most high Lord. Let's pray. God of grace and peace, we come today now recognizing in ourselves this same mix of confusion and despair and perhaps fear we hear expressed in this song.
Speaker 1:You recognize that at times we feel unjustly accused. We feel slighted, pushed, perhaps even cornered. And sometimes we're not sure of how to respond or whether we're just even being paranoid. And yet we acknowledge that you are present even in these confused spaces. That when we are unsure, these are the moments where we need you the most.
Speaker 1:And so we slow our hearts, and we listen to the rhythm of our breathing, and we invite you to be present in this space. Oh lord, open our eyes that we may see the beauty of your goodness. Oh lord, open our hearts that we may hear your truth. Oh lord, open our lips that we may show forth your praise and speak of your grace with conviction. May we walk through the confusion of this Psalm and find ourselves on the other side able to echo the words of the poet.
Speaker 1:I will give thanks to the Lord because he is righteous. I will sing praises of the name of the most high Lord. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright.
Speaker 1:So Psalm seven. Now, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this poem. But to help us move through it, let's break it down into some sections here. Because there are three major movements to this poem, with a final closing statement verse 17 that sort of stands alone. If you're taking notes here, the stanzas are verses one to five, verses six to nine, and then verses 10 to 16 with that closing epilogue in verse 17.
Speaker 1:And so our plan is just to walk our way through these sections of the poem. First though, I did not read it but there is an inscription that goes along with this Psalm. It says, a Shegaon of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning Cush a Benjamite. Now, this word Shegaon, the reason you don't know that word is because it's not English. And the reason it's not English is because none of us know that word either.
Speaker 1:We just don't know what it means. My lexicon says this, that the etymology and meaning of the term are unknown, although it is likely a technical term for a specific type of liturgical song. Now, if that's the case, then we can look at the content of the song to see what that specific type might be. Most scholars have categorized this song, Psalm seven, as a prayer of one who has been falsely accused. Now that might sound a bit oddly specific for a genre, but have you listened to the radio?
Speaker 1:Now, I know you haven't actually listened to the radio. Right? Cause it's 2016 and who does that anymore? But just listen to the lyrics of songs on the radio. Actually, see if you can recognize some of these ones.
Speaker 1:Here we go. I'm just gonna stand here and watch me burn. That's alright because I like the way it hurts. Just gonna stand there and hear me cry. That's alright because I love the way you lie.
Speaker 1:That's Rihanna, 2010. Thought I'd keep it relatively recent to start. I wanna be hip with the kids, know. Try this one though. It must have been love, but it's over now.
Speaker 1:It must have been good, but I lost it somehow. It must have been love, but it's over now from the moment we touched until the time had run out. That's Roxette, a classic from 1990. By the way, it feels very strange reading these lyrics. I will save you however from my desire to burst out in song.
Speaker 1:Okay. Two more here. Let's go back even farther. Try this one. Once upon a time, I was falling in love.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm only falling apart. There's nothing I can do. A total eclipse of the heart.
Speaker 2:It's Bonnie Tyler. By the
Speaker 1:way, I knew that song. I had no idea who sang that. So there you go. Bonnie Tyler, 1983. And here we go, one last one.
Speaker 1:I think if we really want to get the frustration at the power, the primal power behind this song, then we need to turn to the queen bee herself. This is Beyonce 2006. So since I'm not your everything, how about I'll be your nothing? Nothing at all to you. Baby, I won't shed a tear for you.
Speaker 1:I won't lose a wink of sleep because the truth of the matter is replacing you is easy. Now, as amusing as all that was and a chance for me to quote Beyonce in a sermon, the fact is we all understand the emotion of being falsely accused of something. Right? That's why we write pop songs about it. That's why we express it in religious poetry.
Speaker 1:It's why politicians exploit it so readily. We all resonate with this place of feeling persecuted in some sense. And the thing is, this can be incredibly intoxicating. And because of that, if we're not careful, it can also really skew reality for us. I think this is actually one of the profound insights that this poem is hinting at.
Speaker 1:That when we feel we have been mistreated, it's very easy for us to imagine God reacting the way that we might want to as well. But let's start at the opening stanza to this poem, the one for which it's labeled. First, the psalmist says this, Lord my God, I take refuge in you. Save and deliver me from all who pursue me or they will tear me apart like a lion and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me. Fairly grim opening.
Speaker 1:But honestly, that's not even the half of it. The term in the second verse here, they will tear me apart. This is actually the word nephesh in Hebrew. Now, nephesh is generally translated soul or person. It comes to mean the idea of a living being in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:But literally, the word nephesh is the Hebrew for your face or your throat. So this is your soul, Your life, your your breath, that that inhale and exhale from your mouth and throat. You are not your accomplishment. You are the gift of breath that God has given in this moment. That's who you are.
Speaker 1:Now this is why that ancient wisdom of slowing down and listening to the rhythm of our breathing can be so important. There is so much that screams at our senses in the world and culture, and so sometimes we have to intentionally slow down and listen for our soul so that we can recognize the gift of life we have. But the context here of Psalm seven where it says they will tear my soul apart like lions. I think we're mixing our metaphors a bit. This is perhaps something more like they will tear my throat out like a lion.
Speaker 1:It's a very graphic visceral image the psalmist is using that harkens back to the original meaning of this word. As Jacobson says, the brutality of this image is meant to be striking. Now, remember this is poetry and the poet knows what he's doing, but he's linking the brutality of a lion attack with the pain in his soul when he feels falsely accused of something. And you know this pain. And we all do at some level.
Speaker 1:Right? In fact, I think that's what makes it so poignant when the psalmist continues. He says, Lord, if I have done this thing, if there is guilt on my hands, if I have repaid my ally with evil or have caused my foe to be robbed without cause, then let my enemy pursue me and overtake me. Let him trample my life to the ground. Let him make me sleep in the dirt.
Speaker 1:And reading this, you really get the impression that there is likely some very specific situation, some incident that sits behind this song. And if it does come from the life of David, it is probably a story that has been lost to us however. Now, the details of the Psalm don't seem to line up very well with any of the biblical narratives around David. Although that's not all that particularly surprising. David lives a pretty full life even from the stories that we do have and so it's not hard to imagine that he got into a few more scrapes that were outside what was written down.
Speaker 1:For me however, this is part of what makes the Psalm so accessible. We we don't know what happened. We don't know if David is really as innocent as he says he is. We we don't even know who the bad guy is in this story. The inscription says it's another Jew, Kush, a Benjamite, but there's not much we can do with that information to identify this person.
Speaker 1:So all we know is that this was one of David's own people he's in conflict with. Family is tough. Am I right? You know, an argument with a stranger on the bus, that might stick with you for a while. A confrontation with family, that tends to stick around.
Speaker 1:It means long awkward pauses at Thanksgiving and furtive glances across the pews at church. It's hard. Let's be honest to worship when someone beside you has accused you of something nasty. And so now, with the emotions raised and with the stakes laid out, we move into the second stanza. The writer has declared his innocence, but now he says, arise Lord.
Speaker 1:In your anger, rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake my God, decree justice. Let the assembled peoples gather around you while you sit enthroned over them on high. Let the Lord judge the peoples. Vindicate me, Lord, according to my righteousness, to my integrity, oh most high.
Speaker 1:Bring to an end the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure. You, the righteous God who probes minds and hearts. Now, what I notice here first off is this first line in the second stanza that compares the anger of God and the anger of the psalmist's enemies. In your anger, Lord, rise up against the rage of my enemies. Now, the reason you read anger and then you read rage is because these are two different words in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:The first one, one that describes God is the word which actually means nose. We'll come back to that in a second. The second word is evra, which is wrath or fury. It's probably better expressed as an outburst of rage. That's what it means.
Speaker 1:Now, nose. What does that have to do with anything? Well, if soul if your soul is your throat and your face, your breath in Hebrew, well then your anger, your anger is your nose. So what happens when you get angry? Face gets flushed, your nose gets red, your nostrils flare, that's anger.
Speaker 1:Right? It's very visceral visual language here. And so literally what this says if you read it in Hebrew is God arise with your nose. Not because he smells something delicious but because he's angry. What you gonna do when the Lord's nose runs wild on you?
Speaker 1:That's what he's saying here. Don't quote me on that by the way. But here's why this is important here. Because when we talk about aaf, this nose metaphor of the Hebrew scriptures, there's a wide range of application, but the idea is more about indignation. Your face getting flushed.
Speaker 1:This is this is not some unconstrained fury, some outburst like Evra is. They're different. These are related, but in some sense contrasting terms. And I think we get this. Right?
Speaker 1:There are different types of anger. The anger that I feel when I stub my toe is very different from the anger that I feel when the latte art on my coffee is lopsided. I told you I'm very bourgeoisie. James even says in the New Testament that human anger, he qualifies it, does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Now, of course, every time I say this people say, yeah, but what about righteous anger?
Speaker 1:What about when people are abused or exploited? Should we not be angry about that? And first of all, I wanna suggest that there are more options than anger when we see injustice in the world. There is empathy, there is compassion, there is concern, and there is grace, and none of these require you to sit on the sidelines and watch. You can be just as actively involved in creating good from a place of deep empathy as you can from a place of anger.
Speaker 1:Now you realize that there is actually neuroscience that suggests that negative emotions adhere themselves to our memories immediately. It's part of our flight or fight response. Positive emotions actually slip away very quickly unless we consciously reflect on them. It's actually science that suggests it takes fifteen seconds of conscious thought to adhere a positive emotion as tightly as a negative one. I don't think anger is a better motivation.
Speaker 1:I think it's just easier. But okay. You wanna talk about righteous anger? Sure. I guess for James, that still would depend on what you mean by anger.
Speaker 1:Because if it's huffing and puffing and posting on Facebook and stewing about how terrible every other person is, then probably no. That's not going to produce the righteousness God desires. If it's violent and it's demeaning and if it takes one injustice and it turns it into another prejudice, then no. That will not produce the righteousness that God desires. But then again, if you can get angry and then yet also speak of justice and vindication and righteousness and an end to violence in the same breath, the way that the psalmist does when he speaks of God, then perhaps, yes, that might begin to produce something like what God is looking for.
Speaker 1:The problem of course is that's not often what we're talking about when we get angry. And I know that you know what I mean because you're not all that different from me. And when I get angry, I'm not thinking about righteousness. I'm not thinking about peace, and I'm certainly not thinking clearly about what is just. I'm thinking about revenge.
Speaker 1:You see, I wanna suggest the psalmist here is contrasting, not conflating the anger of God with the rage of his enemies. These are different things with different agendas. So this is not a fire with fire type of thing. This is an injustice met by the truth of God type of thing. And it's actually really important that we get this here if we're gonna read what comes next well.
Speaker 1:Because next he says, my shield is God most high who saves the upright in heart. God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day. Now, the NIV has tried to break this out yet again by using yet another English word. So the anger, rage, and now wrath to deal with in this poem. And that's because this is yet another third Hebrew word.
Speaker 1:This time the word zaam. This one means to be indignant or to scold. In fact, most of the time zaam shows up in the old testament, it gets translated as denounced. God denounced them. And if you were looking at just this one verse right here, you might say something like this.
Speaker 1:God is a righteous judge, a God who speaks against evil, who denounces evil all the days. That would be the normal translation of za'am. Now that works, but the question that really comes into play here is in the next couple of verses. Because the psalmist says, if he does not relent, he will sharpen his sword. He will bend and string his bow.
Speaker 1:He has prepared his deadly weapons. He makes ready his flaming arrows. Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives of trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. Now this right here, this is where scholars debate the entire point of this poem. Verse 11 is talking about the frustration of God with our evil.
Speaker 1:We know that. Verse 14 is talking about the one who does evil, the bad person. We know that. The question is, who exactly are verses twelve and thirteen talking about? So here's what Nancy Daclace Wolford, Rolf a Jacobsen, and Beth Laniel Tanier say in their joint commentary.
Speaker 1:Felt like I had to give you all their names instead of just picking one. Can't slight anyone. By the way, one of the best recent commentary on the Psalms, but they say this, somewhere between verses eleven and fourteen, the interpreter must decide where the subject of the verbs changes. From God to the enemy. The data is simply not clear and so solutions must remain provisional.
Speaker 1:Verbs and pronouns work much differently in Hebrew. And so linguistically, you could attach these two verses in the middle to the one before or after equally as well. So the question is, are these verses on the screen, if he does not relent, he will sharpen his sword. He makes ready his deadly weapons. Who is the he that is being spoken of?
Speaker 1:Now there are all kinds of options. For example, the ESV does something really weird here. They translate this, if a man does not repent, then God will sharpen his sword. The reason being that they don't quite wanna say that God is the one repenting. Repent and relent are the same word in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:But they do wanna say that God is the one with the sword and so they stick in pronouns and kind of switch back and forth a few times. It's kind of awkward and to me it really feels forced to read it that way. But the bottom line is this, either God is frustrated with evil and he's preparing for war or God is frustrated with evil as he watches us prepare for war. Those are two very different things. Both of them work linguistically.
Speaker 1:For me, only one of them works theologically. And here's why. First, because the very next thing the psalmist says is that whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit that they've made. The trouble they cause recoils on them and the violence comes down on their own heads. This does not strike me as a poet who sees ultimate value in violence.
Speaker 1:And so I have a tough time imagining this poet ascribing to God the very thing that he sees as self defeating. Now God is angry in this Psalm. Make no mistake about that. But God's anger is not corrupted and tainted by the violence and the weakness and the shortsightedness that characterizes ours. That's the psalmist point.
Speaker 1:It's different. And if this is indeed a psalm about David, if this is a psalm perhaps even written by David that actually makes a lot of sense to me. See David lives a very violent life. He wages wars, he had many enemies and he fought them tooth and nail. And yet somewhere deep in his soul his nefesh perhaps, He also seemed to understand something profound about the divine.
Speaker 1:That God was bigger than what made sense to David. It's actually a point in the scriptures where God calls David a man after his own heart. I think every pastor slash theologian slash anyone who has ever read through David's story throws their hands up in the air when they get to that point. I mean, can the same guy who slept with his neighbor's wife and then had his neighbor murdered, who had so much blood on his hands that God refused to allow him to build a temple. How can that guy be a man after God's heart?
Speaker 1:And a thousand people have tried to nail down exactly what God meant when he described David that way. But when I read David's story, particularly when I come back to his poetry, this is what always strikes me. That David seemed to retain a sense, an awareness that Yahweh was always somehow just beyond him.
Speaker 2:And not in the sense
Speaker 1:of God being away from him, but in the sense that God was always going to be bigger than David could grasp. I said it this way as we started this series. The Psalms remind us that the people of God have celebrated, not run from our inability to completely comprehend the divine. And ultimately, this is what makes the Psalm so incredible to read. See, you and I, we don't have to wrestle with God's response to evil.
Speaker 1:We know what it looks like. It looks like the cross. It looks like God's saying, you don't need to villainize and scapegoat and attack each other anymore. You can follow me into something different. You can imitate my way of peace, my forgiveness.
Speaker 1:But in the Psalms, we read these poets who are reaching and grasping and pointing in directions that they can't quite fully understand yet. They know that God is bigger than they can imagine. They just can't quite conceive of what that means yet. And so they write, and they sing, and they worship, and over time they become an integral part of this building, unfolding, explosive revolution of God's grace that points us and leads us and takes us to Jesus. See, poet struggles with being falsely accused.
Speaker 1:And he wrestles with the presence of evil here in his world and he wonders about how he should respond. But through the inspiration of the spirit, this is where he lands. Their violence comes down on their own heads. Therefore, I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness. And I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord most high.
Speaker 1:And maybe you have been accused of something that you did not do, and it hurts. And you are unsure of how to respond to that. Maybe you look at the world and you see just how broken it is. People who hurt each other And sickness and hunger and you wonder about how you should respond to that. Maybe all that hurt and that evil has come much closer to you than you ever thought that it might.
Speaker 1:So these questions aren't theoretical anymore. It's real and it's lived and it's really hard today. Then understand that the Psalms offer you no simple cliches or painless solutions to your dilemma. And we could be honest, if they did, they would probably be of no help. Instead, what they offer is this humble recognition that the way of peace is what leads to peace.
Speaker 1:Even when it's hard, even when we struggle to understand that. They offer us the chastened acceptance that this will take a lifetime to learn. Even for a man like David whose heart was after God. So for the falsely accused here today, may you sense that your vindication comes not from conflict, but from the Christ. And for those of us who are struggling to walk in the way of peace today, May you come to understand that violence has a way of returning to us.
Speaker 1:So may you lay down your sword, unstring your bow, and give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness. Let's pray. God, thank you for these words and these poems, these songs of your people that are so removed from us by time and space and culture that it sometimes it can be hard to place ourselves into them, into that world of of violence and grandeur and the scope of a man like David in his life. And yet when we sift through it and we reach down into the heart of it, there is also this incredibly human experience of what it means to be falsely accused, what it means to be hurt, what it means to think of you in the ways that we want to think of you, but then to have your spirit penetrate and drive deep into us so that we can be changed transformed and begin to see you in the likeness of your son. God, may we come to understand that violence and anger, human anger has a way of returning on our own heads, And yet the way of peace is what leads to peace.
Speaker 1:Help us by your spirit to imitate your son as you invite us into something new. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright. Three more weeks in the Psalms, and then mark your calendar, September 11.
Speaker 1:We kick off year three here at Commons, and we are super excited about that. So make sure you invite your friends and family and join us for that day. But we will end here as we always do with this. Love God. Love people.
Speaker 1:Tell the story. It's great to be back. Thanks, guys. We'll see you next Sunday. Thanks, everyone.