Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
But good morning, everyone. My name's Devin. For anybody who doesn't know me, I'm one of the pastors here at Commons. And today, we are gonna continue our look at the Psalms. Specifically today, we're gonna look at Psalm a 131.
Speaker 1:And, you know, probably about a month and a half ago when Jeremy sent out the Psalms that we were gonna look at and all the teachers who were gonna teach picked one, I picked this one kinda at random. And so when I sat down, last week to open it up and start to prepare, and I saw that it was only a 131 verses or sorry. Only three verses, I panicked a little bit. But somehow, between then and now, I think I've learned Jeremy's trick of turning only a few verses into a full sermon. So I've got lots to say today.
Speaker 1:So let's jump right on in. Please listen as I read Psalm a 131. A song of ascents of David. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty.
Speaker 1:I do not concern myself with great matters or with the things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself. I'm like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord now and forevermore.
Speaker 1:Psalm a 131. Right away, as we read this Psalm, we should notice that this psalm is described as a song of ascent. Psalm a 131 does not stand alone in this designation. It is just one of about 15 psalms known as the psalm of ascents. Scholars have suggested a few different explanation of how these psalms, came to be and how they were used.
Speaker 1:The first was that, the Levite priest would recite these songs. They would sing them as they walked into the temple tour in Jerusalem to minister. And it was one song for each one of the 15 steps leading up into the temple. Another theory suggests that they may have been composed in order to celebrate Nehemiah's rebuilding of the temple walls in April, while others think that they were simply individual songs that were written before the Babylonian exile and then were compiled after the exile tied to the exile in order to give a way to celebrate and remember the faithfulness of God to his people. But for my money, I think that these psalms were were written to be sung as the people traveled from their homes on their way to the three pilgrimage feasts, which were the feast of Passover, the feast of weeks, and the feast of tabernacles or booths.
Speaker 1:They would rehearse these songs as a way to prepare themselves for the festivals that they were going to attend. The next thing we should notice, is a little subtler, but it is a significant detail. I'm talking about the strong maternal imagery of this psalm. And maybe for us today, that doesn't sound like a big deal. But in the ancient world of this song, unfortunately, women were just property.
Speaker 1:They had no rights, and often their value was measured in how many children they could have and how much work they could do. And men were more or less exempt from any responsibility to care for the women they impregnated or the offspring that came from those relationships. But in this psalm, the psalmist describes the relationship we share with God like the one the mother shares with her child. God is mother who breastfeeds and nurtures us, her children. Now that can be uncomfortable language for some of us.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry about that. But we need to understand that when we see an anthropomorphized description of god, it usually is in the masculine form. But that doesn't mean that God himself is actually male. For most of you, when you imagine God, you imagine God as male. I personally think of Simpson Jesus that you don't you kinda just see beard down, and it's a guy in a robe with this gray beard.
Speaker 1:That's kind of my imagination of God sometimes. And even as I gave this sermon earlier in the service, I had realized how many times I missed kind of reusing the masculine pronoun for God. I said a lot of he, he, he. In this conversation, we're we're trying to emphasize the fact that God is also she. God is also mother.
Speaker 1:So it happens to us all. And even though, the author of this psalm's purpose is not a concise theological statement of God's gender or even to suggest that God has gender at all. What the author is trying to say is perhaps this. In a world of patriarchy where fathers had little to no legal, societal, or cultural responsibility to the women they had sex with or the children that came from those relationships. This all there is saying that Yahweh looks after her children, like a mother takes care of her children.
Speaker 1:The author uses perhaps the most in intimate image of care, that of breastfeeding, to show us something about our relationship with God. This maternal imagery is so strong that some suggest that even though it's officially attributed to David, that this psalm may have been written by a female psalmist. They suggest that she just gave the credit to David. Now that doesn't necessarily have to be the case with this imagery we see. It's very likely that David watched perhaps Bathsheba breastfeed her his son Solomon and was taken up in in this image and of what and who God is in that moment.
Speaker 1:But if it was David who wrote it, then it makes sense that his name is attached to it. When I write something, I put my name on it. But if an unknown female psalmist wrote it instead, why is it so important to have David's name attached to it? I think the reason why king David's name was necessary to this psalm is because he is a larger than life character. He almost crosses a line into those weird bobbleheaded caricatures.
Speaker 1:He's almost not real. I mean, he was a preteen boy who killed the giant Goliath, and before that, he already killed the lion and bear. He played music so well that the king used him to soothe him before sleep so he he could avoid nightmares. He brought back 200 Philistine foreskins on a plate for Saul. How would you like that on your resume?
Speaker 1:He slept with Bathsheba. He fled for his life away from his homeland to avoid being killed. He wrote at least or at least is credited with writing a good portion of the psalter. And he's known as Israel's greatest king. And in the imagination of early Hebrew heroes of this psalm, there is no bigger persona than David, which is exactly why he's being mentioned in this psalm.
Speaker 1:That's essentially about pride. Who was more who has more to be proud of than king David? Even when you stack his failures up against his successes, who else has God called a man after his own heart? I know that if God told me that I was a man after his own heart, I get it printed on business cards. I'd apply for all of those luncheons where you put your card in, and I'd try to find ways to work it into conversations that has no business in.
Speaker 1:Hello. I'm I'm Devin. Nice to meet you. I'm a man after God's own heart. Just just so you know.
Speaker 1:I mean, sounds good. Right? But somehow in this psalm, David claims that his heart is not proud and his eyes are not haughty, which is great. But what does it mean to have a proud heart and haughty eyes? Well, earlier in this series, we talked about the difference between metaphors for modern day heroes and readers of this psalm and the original audience of it.
Speaker 1:Today, we metaphorically link intelligence with the head. Our head is the seat of intelligence. That wasn't the case for the Hebrew people. For the Hebrew people, they did that with the heart. The heart was the center of intelligence.
Speaker 1:What the psalmist is trying to say is that even David, one of the wisest, most experienced king in Israel's history, is somehow able to resist pride. How? Well, I think the answer lies in his identification as a child. And this is not the only time that the bible extols the virtue of children and encourages us to be like them. Listen as Jesus speaks through his disciples in the gospel of Mark.
Speaker 1:At that time, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He called a little child to him and placed the child among him and said, truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. This kind of conversation between the disciples and Jesus happens often and quite typically.
Speaker 1:Jesus says or does something, and the disciples have to try and figure out what it means. You see this particularly in the parables of Jesus, but you also see this sort of thing in the disciples' actions. Think about when Peter cuts the ear off the Roman soldier, and Jesus says, what are you doing, Peter? That is nothing you've seen or nothing I've told you to do. These conversations and interactions form a subtext, especially within the gospel narratives, about what it means to be a disciple of Christ.
Speaker 1:See, discipleship in early Judaism was not as easy as just saying, hey, I like you. Can I follow you around for a bit? It was a formal and strident process, which involved rote memorization of at least the five books of the Torah, as well as many other tests in schooling, which at any point, they could say, you don't got it, kid. Get out of here, and you'd have to go home. But after all of this, the hopeful disciple with enough aptitude and enough work ethic would be deemed worthy to become a disciple, and the rabbi would pick him.
Speaker 1:This is the context of discipleship that Jesus' own disciples had, and they didn't fit this mold at all. Instead of academics and theologians with training, they were blue collar tradesmen, fishermen, and tax collectors. And maybe knowing this, knowing that they did not have the credentials or the pedigree to be a disciple, this is what drove them to find any advantage they could. Maybe this feeling of lacking drove them to ask, who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And you know what?
Speaker 1:I don't think we are entirely different today. Somewhere along the way, we have confused knowing things about God and what books are good to read for knowing God. I think back to my time in university, when I was studying theology. I'd hear someone awkwardly insert into the conversation that they had just finished reading the cost of discipleship, or someone would ask me if I had read love wins and what I thought about it. There was a big brouhaha whether the book, The Shack, was a book of theology or just a narrative.
Speaker 1:Had I read Kelvin's Institutes, debates in the cafeteria that would take place about which theologian got it most right. And unfortunately, I wasn't just a passive observer of this behavior. Sometimes, more often than not, I was an active participant. Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rob Bell, William Young, Calvinist, or lively conversations about theology.
Speaker 1:But sometimes these conversations are not about our relationship with God. They are about our proving to ourselves and to others that we know something, and in turn, that we have a place in the kingdom of God. They were about the fact that I needed to quantify and qualify my relationship with God. Theology had become status. Knowledge had usurped relationship.
Speaker 1:And this is what the disciples are asking for. They are caught up in believing that the reason they were picked by Jesus to be disciples is because of some greatness they cannot see inside themselves And the anxiety of not knowing what that is drives them to panic, to scratch, and to compete in order to be the greatest. Think about the gospel of John, where the writer makes it very known that he is the beloved disciple, that he wins foot races and makes it into the tomb first. Before we go further, let me say, that there's nothing wrong with knowledge. One of the reasons I'm so excited to be a part of this community is our commitment to be intellectually honest as we try and make sense of our faith, understand theology, and interpret the biblical text.
Speaker 1:But there is something disastrous waiting for us when we make our knowledge and our effort to get it the thing that makes us valuable. Jesus' response to his disciples characteristically flips their understanding on its head. He points to a child and he says, be like that. The child is a picture of vulnerability and reliance. Children both in the world of the first century, and in modern world are among the most vulnerable.
Speaker 1:A child does not have the ability to maintain the delusion of self sustaining. Children depend, on family or caretakers and sometimes even government agencies to care for them. This is why the psalmist in Psalm a 131 encourages us like Jesus does in Matthew to become like children. Now here we need to understand that the goal is not to somehow go back to our adolescence and try and adopt the naivety that existed there. No matter what you do, you cannot pretend to not know things.
Speaker 1:You cannot forget the lessons that life has taught you, and the goal should be this. To be like a child not in a developmental sense, but in posture. Or in other words, we should try to avoid childishness while attempting to become childlike. An early fifteenth century theologian and philosopher named Nicholas of Cusall wrote a treatise called De Docta Ignorantia in 1440. And the title is Latin for unlearned ignorance.
Speaker 1:In it, he writes, those, however, who saw that one cannot attain wisdom and perennial intellectual life unless it is given through this gift of grace And that the goodness of the almighty God is so great that he hears those who invoke his name and they gain salvation. Become humble, acknowledging that they are ignorant, and directed their life as a life of one desiring eternal wisdom. And that is the life of the virtuous who proceed in the desire for the other life, which is commended by the saints. Now if you're not a big fan of famous fifteenth century German philosophers like I am, let me say this. In other words, the intuition that the transformation that we seek can come through our own gathering of knowledge alone is wrong.
Speaker 1:The transformation we seek is a gift from God. We cannot work harder, read more, learn more, and be theological enough to get it. In fact, the entire assumption that God is withholding this transformation until we read the right books or think the right thoughts, and then he will give it to us is no good. Yahweh is forever extending his grace to all people at all times in all places, but it is our pride that limits our ability to receive it. So what does it look like to humble ourselves?
Speaker 1:Well, the psalmist points to a child, and not just a child, but that of a weaned child. Weaning is the process, when a child stops feeding at its mother's breast and begins to eat solid foods. At the time that the psalm was written, that was about three years. And in my extensive experience, of weaning children from breastfeeding, I understand that it's fairly similar today. If it's not, come and tell me.
Speaker 1:I'd like to know. So the psalmist is talking about a child who does not need to be near her mother for nourishment, but wants to be near her. The child wants to hear her mother's heartbeat. She wants to feel her mother's breath. She wants to listen as her mother talks and laughs with others.
Speaker 1:In every way possible, she wants to experience who her mother is, and that comes from being close to her mother. And as the child grows, she will look and sound like her mother. As God's children, do we understand transformation this way? That it's not about putting more stuff into our heads, but it's actually about being in the presence of God, the father and mother. Allowing the things we experience from God.
Speaker 1:When we are next to God, shift us. Do we see the do we see people the way God sees people? Do we love like God loves? Do we forgive like God forgives? Do we extend peace and grace like God does?
Speaker 1:We will not learn these things from books. We will learn these things from watching the divine mother and father of all people do these things with his children. So today, can I encourage you to read and gather knowledge and ask questions for sure? But can I also ask you to recognize that the thing that makes you valuable is not how much of that stuff you can put into here? It is simply the fact that you are a child of God.
Speaker 1:And may you seek to listen before you speak, and may you seek to watch before you act. So that we can be a community that has something to share, not from the our own effort, not from the things we think are right or the things that we think are good, but that we have something to share with the world that comes from watching God, the father and mother do those things. Please pray with me. Heavenly parents, draw us close to you. Give us a desire to be near you not when we need something, but when we just want to experience you.
Speaker 1:And help this nearness fight against our own pride, which is really just a reflection of our own effort to become valuable or to prove that we are worth something. Help us to hear your heartbeat that says that that stuff doesn't matter. Help us to see how you treat the rest of your children. And in time, as we've sat on your lap and we've been carried in your arms, help us to be transformed like you. Help us as a community to listen before we speak and to watch before we act so that everything we do, we do because we've seen you do it first.
Speaker 1:Father, for these things, we love you, and we're thankful. Amen.