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Prayer is a pretty big deal. After all, at Commons we opened this year with prayer and we’re closing the year with prayer. From the Lord’s Prayer in the fall, to the Psalms prayer book in the summer, we’ve got instructions and illustrations to shape our prayerful souls in all seasons.
So what’s prayer to you? Is it the recitation of prayers you learned as a kid? Is prayer the words that spring up inside you like “thank you,” “help me,” and “I’m so sorry”? Maybe prayer is becoming less wordy and more connected to deep breaths, centred contemplation, and heart-soaring awe.
There are Christians in all kinds of traditions that pray the Psalms every day, morning and night. And sure, the prayerful poems are more familiar year after year, but they never stop speaking and shaping the human heart before God. Dive into the Psalms with us this summer and find yourself refreshed with honesty, lament, and praise.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna start off with a bit of introduction. My name is Jim Cresswell, and I'm really thankful, to be here tonight. And I wanna introduce myself because I'm not actually a really pastoral. I'm actually not on staff here. Every once in a while, I have the good fortune of giving being given the opportunity to to come and share with you folks.
Speaker 2:You see, my role in the faith community, in our faith community, is that I'm actually a psychologist. Yeah. That's what I do. But I'm not the one that kind that does therapy. I'm a professor.
Speaker 2:I'm a researcher. My area is largely philosophy of mind. So I'm the kind of psychologist that if you want to talk to about getting better, I'll probably make you worse. So I'm privileged to be a faculty member at Amherst University. It's where I instruct full time in the area of psychology, and it means that my role in our church is to be an intellectual.
Speaker 2:I cultivate an attitude where I'm always exploring ideas, and my service to the Christian community is I think to ask authentically hard questions. Now I'm I'm saying this today because I want you to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not coming from a place where I feel like I'm up here speaking with a position of authority of some sort. You see, I'm not a religious scholar, and I have no no pastoral training, so I don't have much right to speak about anything beyond my own experience. And today, I'm gonna take us all through a bit of scripture that I find perplexing, a little confusing.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna push some pretty hard ideas out to you and see how you do. But what this means is, look, I'm just talking about my experience. I'm going through how I'm thinking about a section of scripture, but don't take my words as necessarily authoritative authoritative. But you know what? Take what works for you and leave the rest.
Speaker 2:Can we move on and do work that way? Yeah? Okay. So last Sunday, Bobbie talked about Psalms 32 and confession. She talked about freedom that comes from being honest.
Speaker 2:And earlier, we heard, Yelena talk about confession. I wanna expand a little bit on confession, but I'm gonna take it in a way that is a little bit different, and that we're gonna expand and talk about the the light side or the good side or the freedom in confession that we often kinda missed. So before we get too far into it, I'd love if you would pause for a moment, bow your heads, join me in prayer. God of love and mercy, give us clean hands and hearts that we may walk in innocence and come to your eternal presence. Let us praise you in what we do and say today.
Speaker 2:God, we come before you to hear what you have to say despite the imperfection and the vessels that are blessed to carry your message. Amen. So we're going to talk about a text called from the book of Psalms, the Old Testament book, and it's Psalms 26. What I'll do is I'll read through the whole psalm, and then we'll spend the next little few minutes together kinda unpacking and talking about what's going on here. So here we go.
Speaker 2:Vindicate me, Lord, for I have led a blameless life. I have trusted in the Lord, and I have not faltered. Test me, Lord, and try me. Examine my heart and my mind, for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness. I do not sit with the deceitful, nor do I associate with hypocrites.
Speaker 2:I abhor the assembly of evildoers and refuse to sit with the wicked. I wash my hands in innocence, and I go about your altar, Lord, proclaiming aloud your praise and telling of all your wonderful deeds. Lord, I love the house where you live, the place where your glory dwells. Do not take away my soul along with sinners. My life with those who are bloodthirsty, and whose hands are wicked schemes and whose right hands are full of bribes.
Speaker 2:I lead a blameless life. Deliver me from and be merciful to me. My feet stand on level ground in a great congregation. I will praise the lord. So when Jeremy, lead pastor here, first told me that I'd be preaching this Sunday, and I'd be preaching on Psalm 26, I read it with a fair bit of enthusiasm because I deeply resonated with the sentiment here.
Speaker 2:Look. I have lived a good life. Dang it. And there are people out there that don't get it, how good I've been and how good I am. And I connected look.
Speaker 2:We're gonna go somewhere in a minute, where you guys wait for it. Okay? So it's I connected with this sentiment that I'm a bit of a victim, and maybe with a dash of self pity thrown in there. And so I had this deep resonance until I read it aloud to the people who I love and love me the most. Here we are.
Speaker 2:The one on your right is Natasha, my wife. And the one on the left is Ethan, my son. Both of these people, I'm insufficiently grateful for them. Natasha has made my life better in infinite ways and Ethan has enriched my life amazing in amazing ways. But you know when I read Psalms 26, I had to remind myself of that good stuff because of these people.
Speaker 2:Because they did exactly what you did. You know these people are the the core of who I am. And so when I read to them, they found the scripture a little funny. So when I first read, I have led a blameless life. What what came from Ethan was kinda like a I got to I washed my hands in innocence.
Speaker 2:What I got from both of them were kinda like kinda snorts, like the non piggy kind. And I didn't even get through this you know, there's a second I led a blameless life. I got to I led a blame, and they started laughing at me just like you guys. So before the they start they said they laughed at this. And now my loved ones, they gave me a sense that maybe I wasn't being taken too terribly seriously here.
Speaker 2:I think the thing is, it appears to me that those who are equipped to know me the best, they don't resonate in the confidence I had in my own piety and self righteousness. Clearly, and awkwardly, something like you folks here, there was something funny about my claims to be a bastion of pure goodness. You know, I think those closest to us often bless us with the truth, whether we like it or not. And I think Natasha and Ethan both revealed something. You see, I think if we're all honest, it's pretty hard for any of us to claim that we have led a blameless life.
Speaker 2:I think it's pretty hard for us to say that we have always been mindful of God's unfailing love. Somehow, the psalm doesn't seem to line up with life in reality. So part of our confusion here could come from our background. You know, I'm a psychologist I mentioned earlier, and one thing that psychologists are one of the reasons I love being psychologist is that we're really aware of the fact that humans are really bad at seeing anything. And what I mean by that is you have no direct access to the world.
Speaker 2:Everything you see or think you see is mediated. That is, it's shaped. And it's shaped through the background experiences you have. And this includes reading the bible, by the way. You know, anything we read or anything we look at can only be understood through the information that's available to us.
Speaker 2:So background experiences, traditions, and language especially, we bring this to bear whenever we look at something. Now the bible verses that we've just read, they would feel like arrogance and conceit, but these feelings come from the way that we're located in a particular historical space and time. You see, we look at this section of text through a very modern or late modern or postmodern lens. It's pretty individualistic. That is we think about faith as often being about an individual relating to God.
Speaker 2:That's how we often think right now. The psalm from this individualistic perspective would be a prayer to God from an individual that feels like one's goodness is complete. You see, we would read a scripture like this today as someone that sees prayer as being about an individual soul communing with God. But, you know, this way of reading the scripture would not have always been the case, and it's highly unlikely this was how it was read in the Old Testament times. Theologians, they point out that this piece of the bible is likely a song that was sung as part of a religious ritual.
Speaker 2:That is the meaning has something to do with the community, and we can't just take an individual's orientation to it if we're going to understand it. The priest would be who who would be performing the ritual would say, vindicate me, and what the priest is doing is asking God to publicly declare that one is clean at the beginning of a religious ritual. It's spoken to the people present as much as it's spoken to God. So it's more like a demonstration to the present community that one is willing to be examined. The person performing the religious ritual is saying to God and the community at the same time, hey, I am willing to be examined and display rigorous honesty.
Speaker 2:This invitation of divine examination, demonstration of willingness to be what we would consider vulnerable on an individualistic mode, it does entail an expression of openness to feedback. It expresses how the community has a close relationship with God and the priest as a representative, and part of that community is demonstrating that the community trusts God like we today would maybe have a close friend that we trust for honest feedback. It is saying that people trust God to take a close look at them. See, what we're looking at here is a conversation about the courage to be completely open. This is a hard thing for us to do, and I imagine it was a hard thing for people to do several thousand years ago too.
Speaker 2:Because a lot of times we spend our time presenting ourselves in a favorable light. Have you ever felt like your insides don't match what you see on the outsides of others? Have you ever been scared that someone might see that difference? This psalm kind of raises this conversation, but does so in a way that's about a community coming together to face that fear. It's about collective openness.
Speaker 2:So here's where we get this radically different view that falls quite far from our individualist reading. This section of the bible involves a way of thinking where one's goodness is not defined by one's state or one's own state. This is radically different way of thinking about goodness. Goodness and being good and being blameless in this particular context is defined by who one is with. That is, the goodness is defined by what group you're part of.
Speaker 2:The meaning of the text is one that can be is that we can be open to examination because the priest and the rest of the community is together, and they're with God. The priest expresses a willingness to be examined knowing full well that association with God and the community that believes in God is gonna protect him. So in one way, we see a really beautiful picture of a community's loyalty to God where they see themselves as collectively blameless. They rely on God's love and his goodness. It's a picture of a community that has integrity because of trust in God to examine them and to guide them, and it's not about one person having to prove him or herself.
Speaker 2:It illustrates a dependence on God who makes people good because he loves them. Now this is a real powerful image here, and it shows how God is not about assigning blame. Think back to the idea of making oneself open and vulnerable. You know, I think today for us it's scary because we don't know what others are gonna do when we make ourselves vulnerable. How many of us often have people in our lives who we can be totally open with?
Speaker 2:More importantly, do we take this kind of trepidation, this fear about being open, and do we generalize it to God? You see, we might protect ourselves out of fear of what others will think and generalize that way of acting to God. You know, God is like a friend who invites us to be open because he's not seeking to blame us. We have a hard time, I think, seeing that. So what what this text does on the one hand is it raises the really important point that we can make ourselves available for examination.
Speaker 2:It's okay. We can do it without fear. We do not need to be perfect because God's inclined to help us. Despite our hurts and pains, the text offers the idea that being with God and being open to examination is totally okay. Alright.
Speaker 2:I hope you're tracking with me because I'm gonna shift gears here for a second. Those of you who are listening carefully picked up on something, is that this text, it's about a community seeking themselves as blameless by virtue of group affiliation. You know for me part of my autobiography leaves me with a little bit discomfort here. You know, I've been hurt in the context of the Christian community. Some of you may be like me, may maybe you've been hurt by people who are well meaning in a community that considers itself Christian.
Speaker 2:Because of course Christianity, like all other communities, has its own subculture, its own norms, own ways of talking, ways of acting. And I I am actually really sensitive to anything that smells or looks like this in group or out group distinctions. You know it seems to me like like often, the people that we consider to be good coincidentally are the people that are part of our own particular in group. That talk the way we talk, that move the way we move, that act the way we act. Right?
Speaker 2:It's not about any kind of goodness per se. So there's an issue of group affiliation here. And I'm gonna make a really strong claim here, is that I think when we look at this psalm honestly, there's a dark side to it. We see a section of text that is tied to group distinctions. The context of this text would be read in a way where the groups of sinners is defined along the lines of social groups.
Speaker 2:We're not talking about individual sin. What constitutes a group of sinners is they're not us. That's the way the text would have been read. I think we need to be very honest about that. We need to be honest about the fact that the injunctions where it says don't get in intimate relationships with evil people, this is likely a warning against intergroup marriages.
Speaker 2:The comments about how you shouldn't hang out with evil people, it's it's about not being with the out group. So this us versus them thinking that if we're gonna be honest is in the scripture, it's there, this is actually a defining feature of Christianity that's kind of a holdover. We still hang on to these things, these in group out group distinctions. I think that's pretty defensible ground on my part to say that we often shape in group out group us them. And maybe we've been hurt by it.
Speaker 2:I think some people have been hurt by these things. So I'd like us to be really honest about that and say, well, what do we do? Because the text inspires us to be rigorously honest with God and ourselves. It inspires us to see how we can depend on God. But how do we read this particular text without this us versus them baggage thrown in?
Speaker 2:Well, answering the question begins with a joke, and the joke was on me when I read Psalm 26 to my family, and they laughed, and you've laughed. They revealed something absolutely crucial about how we approach the bible, and it's something that we massively I think we massively neglect in churches today. My family found it ironic that I was reading about a blameless life. They displayed what I think is one of the greatest gifts that God has given us, and it's called ironic laughter. We don't talk a lot about laughter in church, because usually when people talk about positive emotions, what do we shift to in church?
Speaker 2:We shift to talking about joy. It's a lot safer. It's a lot easier. But I'm gonna push back and run the risk and talk about laughter in relation to our faith. You know, authors who, write about irony, they say that there's a lot more to irony or ironic laughter than just a figure of speech.
Speaker 2:There's a lot more to a joke than just something that makes us, kinda giddy. Laughter is weighty, and living well often requires one to be ironic and laughing. So to explain why they make such strong claims, what irony has to do with reading Psalm 26 and getting rid of this us versus them mentality, I need to actually take a little bit of a detour and explain and tell you a little bit about irony, because I bet you it's something not a lot of us have thought about. And my guess is that we haven't really pondered, well, what is irony very often? Irony, of course, is super uncanny because it's not sensible, and it's unreasonable.
Speaker 2:It is the literal meaning can be opposite of the intended meaning. We're often trapped in a realm where we feel feel like we need to ground ourselves in formal logic, and irony, of course, throws logic out the window. It is often a play that twists with meanings and words in a way that is deeply experiential, hence we laugh. It might not only be logical, but here's the important part of irony, it reveals truth. So I'll I'll give you an example.
Speaker 2:When I was 11 years old and my grandmother died that's not the funny part. Hang on. It was after the funeral, and the extended family was at home. And we're we're we're actually at the home of my uncle Mort and my aunt Jean, Mort and Jean. And in those days, when someone died, the funeral home would courier the ashes to your house.
Speaker 2:So we're all at the house, Uncle Morton, Aunt Jean's house, and the doorbell rings. Now my uncle, he goes to the door and he calls from the foyer, Jean, your mom's here. That was funny. And we all laughed really, really hard. See, this phrase plays with the everyday mundane reality of one's mother coming over, And it brings it together with the shocking and crushing reality that we were all facing, which is the death of someone we loved.
Speaker 2:The fact that my uncle's claim is literally true is absurd and illogical, in light of how what we really mean by someone coming over is not used to talk about dead people's ashes. So you know what distinguishes irony from other forms of humor and laughter is what it does in our lives. You see, irony is also deadly serious, and good humor is often deadly serious because of the way it reveals what's true but we have a hard time expressing. When my family laughs ironically with me, it reveals the truth that I am not blameless and I am not perfect, just like that words imply. There's there's something revealed there.
Speaker 2:So familiar truths that we usually don't see because they're so unfamiliar to us, they're made less familiar with irony and laughter. It reveals hard truths about the kind of destruction that without the kind of destruction that can come with hard truths. Irony is beautiful because it re enables a kind of revelation that also regenerates. You know, my uncle could make the joke, it revealed the truth that grandma's dead, but it also gave us kind of life in that moment. There are a lot of truths that we don't want to face, and irony reveals these truths in a really unique way that's different from logical confrontation.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine if my wife and son had listened to me politely, read the bible read those bible verses, and then they put together a treatise or a dissertation or just a series of logical propositions outlining how I was not so blameless. What is that? That'd be deeply irritating. So irony, as opposed to argument, brings about a purposeful way of exposing illusion didn't raise my defenses. I could laugh along with my family in a way that I could not if they came to that with stone cold heartless logic to say, this is why you're not blameless and catalog my sins for me.
Speaker 2:Irony did that work. Irony introduces a real healthy form of humility into life. Ironic laughter equalizes people in a way that is significantly different from something like sarcasm, for example. You know, sarcasm also reveals truth, but it does it to put others down and hurt them. Ironic ironic laughter has a different quality to it.
Speaker 2:It's marked by simple honesty about the realities of life. Irony puts us all on the same page. It equalizes us by revealing how we are all in the same predicament together. We all share a common human experience. We all experience death at some point, and my uncle allowed us to see the deeply serious reality at grandma's dead.
Speaker 2:We laughed together and we regenerated together. It's an authentic humility. The trouble with irony is that it can feel really risky because it undercuts the hierarchies, and under and it can challenge the stuff that we tend to take pretty seriously. You know, the irony that I got from my family, for example, is a challenge to my piety. The humility that comes from irony radically challenges what we take for granted, which means it can be terrifying and dangerous as much as it is liberating, which is why we tend to move to talk about joy instead of laughter in church.
Speaker 2:We often think that there are things that should be taken seriously. For example, we often think the bible's one of those things we have to take super seriously. Maybe we also have to take our Christian subculture pretty seriously, we think. Maybe not. Maybe we can laugh at it sometimes.
Speaker 2:It's easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we're engaging in radical self questioning when all we're really doing is smuggling our own prejudices. Now these prejudices can feel super convincing, and irony is when we become aware of our own capacity for self deception. You know, I was unaware of my own self deception in reading the text without reservation that I'm blameless, and irony made me kind of aware of this. Radicalness and something like a kind of detachment comes when we see irony in our life. You know, it can be threatening if it touches on something that's treated with seriousness like my grandmother's death, the bible, our in group, but it can also give us freedom because we don't have to take ourselves so seriously.
Speaker 2:Think about your own life and the elegance of a joke that revealed truth. Think of how it can play with the stuff that you take to be sacred. Did it reveal something in a way that regenerated you? I think if you're honest, we all know the power of humor and laughter. We all know what it's like to laugh with people and feel that regeneration.
Speaker 2:It's perfectly okay to laugh at ourselves. And folks, here's where it gets odd, maybe. It's totally okay to laugh at God. God can take a joke. It's God.
Speaker 2:He can handle it. Okay? Irony opens us up to correction because we don't take our prejudice seriously, and God knows this. The person, the ironist, someone who's ironic, is fully aware that what you think can be might be absolutely wrong. Irony, and I think God knows this, gives us space for us to be aware that what we think about ourself and the world could change.
Speaker 2:We may change one day. I think God's okay with that. Humility from irony means we accept our radical doubts and our own take on things, and it might be different. So folks, what I've done now, I've kind of taken some time, I talked about the scripture, a problem that I have with the scripture, and I talked a little bit about irony. What I wanna do is go back to the psalm and take another look at it.
Speaker 2:It raises the point that we can make ourselves available for this for examination. We don't need to be perfect because God's inclined to help us in a situation where we are not perfect. Despite our hurts and pains, the psalm offers the idea that God is there and he's and being open to examination is okay. Now the reason that I went to irony is that these great messages are tangled up with identification between in groups and out groups. So if we read it with a sense of irony, we can keep the good and get rid of the stuff we need to move on from.
Speaker 2:So let's go back to the issue of what it feels like to be examined. You know, when my family made fun of me as I read the text, I wasn't ashamed. You know, when we can laugh at ourselves, we don't need to be ashamed, and irony is the opposite of shame. We can laugh at ourselves as we read the text because it ironically reveals that we're not blameless. There's something kind of funny about us reading it.
Speaker 2:Me reading, I am blameless, and it reveals my own inadequacies that, of course, I'm not blameless. We don't have to be ashamed of them, of these inadequacies, because God we're asking God, to examine us. And think about this. Asking God to examine you is an ironic request. Look, folks.
Speaker 2:God knows. You say examine me, God. He knows what's there. Right? There's nothing that can stop him from loving you despite that.
Speaker 2:Irony involves this willingness to be examined while retaining the hope. Know, because the examination when we open ourselves up to God in irony, it's not about passering or failing. It's not that kind of examination. The ironic reading brings us to self self acceptance. We can imagine wanting to be better and knowing that God is working with us.
Speaker 2:So let's come back to this part of the text where it talks about being blameless because of the people we hang out with. Now remember, in case you I picked some some highlighted some good stuff here in case you forgot. I abhor the assembly of evildoers, and I refuse to sit with the wicked. Lord, I love the house where you live, the place where your glory dwells. Do not take away my soul from the sinners, my life with those who are bloodthirsty, and whose hands are wicked schemes, whose right hands are full of bribes.
Speaker 2:You know this text is referring to people of of different groups as evildoers, sinners, and my personal favorite, bloodthirsty. Think about the claim that we're supposed to avoid evil persons. This is kind of ironic because you know we have to judge someone else as being evil if that's the case. And look, I think we're all, you know, there's just as much evil in me as there is in anybody else, if I'm gonna be honest. What do we do with this characterization of another group when we see that, you know, we today, we dwell in a pluralistic world where these types of characterizations are tied up.
Speaker 2:When you hear these out in the media, these are tied up with hate and violence, these types of words. What do we do with the temptation to read this text as giving us license to distinguish us from them? Well we read the text ironically, and we read it as an exaggeration of our own inclination to judge others. We say, hey look, the text does this, and guess what, I can't do that too. And the irony in this text is that it uncovers the judgmental parts of us that we wanna work on.
Speaker 2:What is even better is that we can read the text together and we can all laugh together. The irony that we recognize that fellowship with others in this temptation and we want to work and get better despite ourselves, you can read the text and it can still reveal something. So folks, I've I've hope you survived here and I haven't been too dense. But I I want you to get the idea that reading the text ironically allows us to recognize that we can open ourselves to God's examination, and it's gonna be okay. We can read the text and it reveals our own biases or reveals our own hurts that we don't have to be ashamed of because we're working on them.
Speaker 2:We're human like everybody else. Turns out everybody's human and ironically, God still loves us. So folks, kind of three main points. If there's nothing that you've picked up, what I would love for you to pick up are three main points. One, you can open yourself to be examined by God.
Speaker 2:Two, you do not need to be afraid or ashamed because you're part of God if you're willing to be there. Three, you don't have to take yourself seriously, and laughter, even the bible, with the bible, is a good thing. So I'm a professor, so are there any questions? We don't do that here. But if you'd like, you can join us at Midtown Pub after the service, which I to my understanding, you head down the road and turn left.
Speaker 2:It's on what street? I hear a lot of things. Wherever it was, you go there and turn left. If you'd like someone to pray with you after the service, there's people that are happy to take the time. I've spoken with them.
Speaker 2:They're nice. Trust me. Look for a tag that says prayer team. So what I'd like to do folks, I wanna finish with a prayer from Saint Saint Thomas More, and it's called the prayer for good humor by Saint Thomas More. So will will you bow your heads with me, please?
Speaker 2:Grant us, oh lord, good digestion and also something to digest. Grant us healthy bodies and the necessary good humor to maintain them. Grant us simple souls that know the treasure of all that is good and don't frighten easily the sight of evil, but rather find the means to put things back in their place. Give us a soul that knows not boredom, grumbling, sighs, or laments, nor excuses, nor stress because of that obstructing thing called the eye. Grant us, oh, Lord, a good sense of humor.
Speaker 2:Allow us grace to be able to take a joke and discover in life a little bit of joy and to be able to share it with others. Amen.