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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 Commons cast. 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:So thank all that you have chosen to join us here today. We really appreciate that you've taken time to worship with us. I know some of you have probably stopped being folk festers for, like, an hour, and you've come over here, and we really appreciate that you would choose to do that. For those of you that I haven't met personally, my name is Scott, and I know some of you might be sitting here thinking, like, I I know this guy from somewhere, and it's true because I am the guy who stood right here and in this sermon referred to Bobby as baby, which was only moderately awkward. But the point is is that I am part of pastoral team here.
Speaker 2:It's one of my great joys to serve with Bobby and others. And I spend most of my weekends leading in our Inglewood Parish, which for those of you who happen to be keeping track, it is five hundred and sixty seven days old today, which is super cool. And I get to teach and lead in that community and see the ways that Commons is growing to become part of the East Side neighborhoods that surround us there. And friends, I want you to know that I really do trust the process that we are in together, the ways that being parishes is growing and stretching us. That said, it's always so nice to come back and see many familiar faces and also so many new ones and to be in this conversation that we're all in together.
Speaker 2:And I'm super excited to jump into our journey through the Psalms today, which we will get to in a second. But first, I wanna think a moment about this idea of parishes that we toss around here at Commons. Earlier in the spring, we actually worked through a series called habit, and in one of the sermons, I spoke in Inglewood about our community habits. See, because I'd been reading about this group of researchers who were working with people struggling with addiction and how they had discovered that as those people tried to form safe and healthy habits to combat bad ones, community played such a significant role in their success. And this was because being in a community informed these individuals' belief that they could change, even if they hadn't yet, even if they were struggling to.
Speaker 2:And why was that? Well, because they were in a place where they could see others doing it. And one of the researchers in that study remarked, people might be skeptical about their ability to change if they are by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief, this researcher suggested. And that phrase really got me thinking.
Speaker 2:It got me thinking about our patterns and our rhythms and our habits, our liturgies, these things that we do week in and week out here at Commons, how our coffee break is not just a transition. You may not know this. It's actually some weeks, I think it's the holiest thing we do when we turn our eyes from the front of the room and towards each other. And we recognize the divine in another person who might be hurting. We recognize the warmth of a person who's in our space for the very first time.
Speaker 2:And in doing this, we move from saying and believing that worship is communal, and we welcome with our voices and with our bodies. And I wonder, is this weekly practice of doing that as a church, is that helping you and teaching you to be more hospitable? Not just here, but in all your living where you start to pay attention to in the pauses of your life, oh, there's somebody I don't know. There's somebody that looks like they're looking for a place to head. Or what about our shared prayers?
Speaker 2:Where here at Commons, we are regularly reminded that we are global citizens? Or what about our teaching, which consistently encourages us to look at Jesus if we wanna see what God's like? To accept that love really is more powerful than following the rules? Or what about the way that we're invited to the Eucharist table, as we were last week, where we are all served and we are all reminded? Young and old, regardless of our status, our gender, our orientation, we are reminded that we need grace and that we receive it.
Speaker 2:And I wonder, has coming to an open table like this helped you to become more open? And I realize that's a lot of questions, but I want to add one more, which is, what about those way we talk about being parishes in different parts of this city? Being local, rooted, embedded communities, where our local partnerships are more than just this thing we talk about and try to frame for you as people, but they become an expression of our work in neighborhoods to make them more equitable. Or what about our dinners and our groups, which Bobby just referenced? How they aren't just a program that we run, but they're this embodiment of our belief that transformation act, it happens around tables and in conversations with people who are different than us.
Speaker 2:Or what about our stampede breakfast, which you may not know this, but they're more than a block party. They're part of our liturgy of neighborhood, where we believe that churches should practice this as a way of shaping how people think about what the divine might be like. See, since the beginning, Commons has been aspiring to be this network of parishes in the heart of our city, learning to tell the story of Jesus and working for justice and creating welcome spaces for fellow Calgarians. And in Inglewood, we are well on our way to extending that dream from this room into new neighborhoods, and we celebrate the ways that you continue to grow into what it means to do that here in Kensington. But we also trust that this growth and this stretching and maturity we're going into as a community that is leading us towards new parishes in the future.
Speaker 2:Because, well, I really do think that communities like ours spark belief. Belief that the world has pockets of kindness in it, belief that we can find ways to coexist across different perspectives and backgrounds, belief that personal change is possible, belief that God may actually, in fact, be good. And I think this way because Commons is teaching me to believe this, teaching me that I'm changing, teaching me that the world can change. So thank you for the ways that you lean into that here in Kensington. And if you are a guest with us today, thank you for joining us in the journey we're on, for giving us your time and attention today.
Speaker 2:And with that said, let's get to work talking about mixtapes, enjambments, the right kind of atheism, and we find all this in Psalm 14. Before we get there, let's pray together. God, help us now as we quiet ourselves. And maybe for the first time this week, maybe for the first time in a long time, as we open ourselves to sense you. And in some small way, as we begin to bear witness to the mysterious love that's behind all things, And what happens as we start to do that in community, I think that we find that our words begin to fail us.
Speaker 2:And perhaps for some of us, our experiences this week leave us longing for peace and for comfort, for some clarity of mind, which is why we're grateful that in this moment, we can know that we are seen by you. Yes, we're seen by our friends and welcomed here, but we're also known by you seeking soothing spirit. We pray that you'd give us courage to trust your quiet work. And where we are restless, bring peace. Where we are hurt, be present.
Speaker 2:Where we, a, can we search and we whisper for help, Be peace for us, and help us to extend that to each other. Teach us now as we turn our eyes to you, o Christ, in whose name we pray and hope. Amen. Alright. So last week, we walked through Psalm 13, which is this soaring lament, and lament is the largest genre in the Psalm collection that we have.
Speaker 2:And, actually, there's this eclectic quality to the psalms, and one of the things that makes that valuable for us is the way that it incorporates voices and perspectives. And those sort of differences that are found in the collection, this has led one scholar to refer to the psalms as a bit of a mixtape, which I realize is a dated social reference, because we don't make t we don't make tapes and CDs of different artists cobbled together anymore. We don't have to do this, because our music providers come up with playlists of things that we might like on their own, which is great. Quick aside here, unless you share your Apple Music account or your Spotify account with someone, and maybe, if this is true, you end up as I did recently. Maybe you're just commuting, you're looking for something to listen to.
Speaker 2:And then as I did, I said, wait. I I did not recently listen to Taylor Swift, and I felt sort of incriminated by what it was saying to me. And that's because I had to think for a moment. I'm like, oh, wait. My oldest daughter, she's 13.
Speaker 2:Okay. And she went on our other computer, it links to my account. So I felt slightly less guilty. The point is is that it had turned my preferences into a kind of confusing nightmare mixtape. And the point is that the Psalms can be like this too, where you never quite know who the artist is, and you don't necessarily know what the poem's gonna be about.
Speaker 2:Because in one moment, the poet will be encouraging us to be thankful because God's good. That's Psalm one thirty six. And then the track changes, and the poet's calling on God to murder some infants. That's Psalm one thirty seven, which we're not covering today. It's a tough one.
Speaker 2:And I wanna say that this I wanna say more about this mixed up quality second, in part because today, we aren't even flipping a page in a physical bible. We're moving from Psalm 13 last week to Psalm 14 this week, which reads, for the director of music, a psalm of David. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. Their deeds are vile.
Speaker 2:There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who see God, and all have turned away. All have become corrupt. There's no one who does good, not even one. And do all these evildoers know nothing?
Speaker 2:They devour my people as though they're eating bread, and they never call on the Lord. But there they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company of the righteous. You evildoers, you frustrate the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge. Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion when the Lord restores his people, let Jacob rejoice, and let Israel be glad. Now, there's a couple things to note about this poem.
Speaker 2:First, that it is actually the only poem in all the psalms that's actually repeated in the collection. Interestingly, this psalm is included again in Psalm 53, with just a few minor differences, and scholars believe that that repetition is there. It points to the fact that this poem was used by different communities or traditions in Hebrew history. But the second thing to note is that this poem gets some airtime in the Christian scriptures. Poems are actually strewn all through the story of Jesus and his earliest followers because, well, they were Jewish, and the Psalms were and still are at the core of Jewish community and worship.
Speaker 2:And the point is that Psalm 14 gets some significant airtime in Paul's letter to his friends in Rome, and there Paul's arguing that people, in general, are pretty awful. And to make his point, he pulls together this collection of quotes, mostly from the Psalms. He says, look, everyone, regardless of ethnicity, their background, participates in making humanity the worst. And then he cites his sources. As it is written, Paul says, there is no one righteous, not even one.
Speaker 2:There's no one who understands. There's no one who seeks God. Everybody's turned away. They've together become worthless. There's no one who does good, not even one.
Speaker 2:And after that parade of insults, you might be saying, oh, actually, I think I can see the first three lines of Psalm 14 there. But then Paul starts pulling lines from all kinds of poems, painting this image of human experience. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Speaker 2:Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood, and on he goes. And if you look, and I've put a screenshot of the text up for you, you can see how Paul's lifted lions from various places to build this riffies on. You can see it in the footnotes, which is an important way to learn how to read your bible. If you see these little notes there, watching, paying attention to how the author's pulling from different places, but it's also a really important observation to make about how reading the psalm should inform how we think about our spiritual journeys.
Speaker 2:Because Paul was using our poem for today, which was an ancient text in his day. He's using it to build a theological argument. He's piecing together words and ideas and rhyme and picture to build truth, which is what you do when you pick up the psalms and when you let them become a narrator for your life, like Psalm 89 might, with echoes of last week when it says, oh, Lord, how long will you hide yourself? How long is your anger gonna burn? Remember how fleeting my life is.
Speaker 2:Or Psalm 94, that might express some of how you felt in some season of your life, where the poet says, when I said my foot is slipping, your unfailing love, Lord, it supported me. And when anxiety was great inside of me, you're consolation. It brought me joy. Or Psalm one eighteen, which might frame a space that you've come to in some season. When hard pressed, the poet says, I cry to God who brought me into a spacious place.
Speaker 2:The Lord is with me. I don't need to be afraid. And when you use the psalms like this, you can add them to other sayings and poetry and beauty. Say, the writing of Christian Wyman, or the protest of Chance the Rapper or the fiction of Margaret Atwood, the biographies of a thousand interesting people. And as you collect this, you find, like Paul it seems, that you are building your faith or that in some ways that truth is building you, pulling it together into a kind of theological mixtape.
Speaker 2:This rhythmic combination of ways that you think of God and think of others, think of yourself, think of the world, think of all the many things that you were going through right now, and the ways that you're learning to tell the story well. So don't forget to use the Psalms. Now, this text that we're looking at today actually gives us some tools for this storying work that we do. The ancient writer speaks of a fool who thinks there is no God, and we're gonna come back to that in a second. But then the poet goes on describing the world as they see it.
Speaker 2:There's corruption. There's malice. There's everybody failing to do good, and scholars debate whether this is actually a lament psalm like the previous one, with its references to how the poor are being victimized, the strong are consuming the weak. Or maybe it's more in keeping with the wisdom literature and psalms and sayings because of how it seems to be encouraging a life of care for other people. And whatever the case, the author paints this picture of humans who are up to no good.
Speaker 2:And then and here's the translation of Robert Alter. The poet says that, The Lord from the heavens looked down on the sons of humankind to see if there's someone discerning, someone seeking out God. And Alter notes that, like we talked about last week, Hebrew poetry often uses parallelism, saying one thing in one line and then again in the next with some reframing. But he notes how this feature is actually missing in this poem, how instead this poet is using enjambments from line to line. And you are gonna wanna take notes so that you can use this at dinner parties and on your first dates in the future.
Speaker 2:Okay? Because, basically, enjambment is a literary term that just refers to how poets continue sentences without pausing at the end of a line or stanza, how they use run on sentences, the purpose being to catch us as readers by surprise, where meaning is held back until the next line is read. And it's used by lots of poets. In fact, I think the way that these work is very much how many of us picture poetry in general. But there's a famous example by a guy named Langston Hughes, who wrote a poem entitled Harlem.
Speaker 2:What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode, which seems so coy?
Speaker 2:And the point is that Hughes uses enjambments, how his sentences run into each other, to articulate this yearning in twentieth century America for equality, for the reviving of Harlem where he lived, and for the promise of America. And he named prophetically in that last line the violence that would emerge in response to how these things are so long in coming. In fact, they still haven't come in many cases, and they erupted in violent riots in Harlem in 1943 and 1964. And the point being that poets like Hughes use a device like enjambments as a way to keep us reading, to shock us with their imagery, which is why Alter's observation of enjambment is so provocative in Psalm 14, I think. See, because the Hebrew syntax in this Psalm draws our eyes downward, where we mirror the divine gaze.
Speaker 2:The Lord looked down on humankind to see, and we're sort of waiting. And we shouldn't forget that the poets told us that there are those who say there is no god, and so here's the artist providing an alternative image. One in which with narrative sequence, we're invited to picture god looking down on us and all we do, but that's not where it ends, because the poet shows us that what God sees is us at our worst. All turned astray is the language. And in hiking terms, that just means that all of us are off the path.
Speaker 2:We're just running around in the woods. We're off the grid. We're lost. And the poet names what we already know, that when we get lost, we have a propensity to wound and to injure and to devour each other. The picture isn't good.
Speaker 2:But this is where all the enjambments pay off. Because remember, the poets painted this picture of God up high, searching, and we keep reading line after line, hoping that the story changes, and all we find is more darkness until the poet names how those who are doing their worst to others, how those people are overwhelmed with fear, and there in the middle of their violence and their vice, they are afraid because God is present in the company of the righteous. And, of course, the force of anticipation has kept us reading from line to line, searching for God, hoping that God shows up, and up to a point, it appears that the person who says there is no God might have something to go on because the poet strings us along. We descend from the heights of heaven to the very center of human experience. There are people being consumed with God nowhere to be found until we see shockingly at the end of a series of enjambments that God is with the righteous.
Speaker 2:And in this moment, the most important thing for us to pay attention to isn't that this poem fits in a Hebrew imagination of God. And we don't need to unpack Hebrew history to understand it. Instead, I think we need to hear an invitation to read our own lives with a commitment to using enjambments. And what do I mean? Well, it might look like that place in your life that you come to where with the record of the difficult things that you've experienced as a child, maybe you made some poor choices when you were younger, where now you are in the next line of your life learning to name and speak and work through those, but you also have begun to believe that the story of your life is still going, that you aren't captive to those things.
Speaker 2:Or it might look like where in your attempts to grow and to start a new venture in the past, maybe to pursue a new career, to begin a new relationship, to seek out affection where you thought it would be, and when your attempts to in that have faltered and fallen flat on their face and left you to pick up the pieces, you have still, in the next line, come to see that the poetry of your life is still unfolding. And in this new season, maybe you are finding new strength to live on and to seek the best. Or maybe it looks like where your faith may have faded. Maybe your questions that you have of God, quite rightly, they drown out the answers that you have been able to find. And yet now, in the next line of your life, you are finding that you are in a space where God is present in this moment and where you are listening to the words of an ancient poet an invitation to continue on in your spiritual journey.
Speaker 2:Now, I am not suggesting for a moment this idea that if you just keep moving, that everything's gonna work out fine. That would not be honest. What I am saying is that the poets of the Psalms are worth your time. They're worth listening to because they name the way that the divine can show up and be found in the places of your life where you least expect it, which challenges us to imagine, even in the way that they string sentences together, that the worst of our experience is not the end of the story, but that in fact, if our lives are beautiful at all, it's because they nudge us from darkness and mistake into the next line where grace is present in the company of those who need it, even today. Which brings us to the beginning of the poem, which might seem a little counterintuitive, but it's not.
Speaker 2:Because this whole piece hinges on knowing what the poet's proposing here, where they say, the fool says in their heart, there is no God, which I imagine in the past has encouraged some people to make this a poem about atheism, and in turn to write sermons about atheism, trumpeting the wisdom of philosophical and existential belief in God. But this isn't a poem about atheism, which is why this isn't a sermon about atheism. But here is what I will say, that there are many healthy and helpful ideas proposed by atheists about God's existence. Some that I believe can't intellectually be refuted, while others, I just openly admit that I don't find them satisfactory to explaining a good way to live in the world. The point is that I'm a theist, and that doesn't mean that somehow I'm wise, and my friend who is an atheist is a fool.
Speaker 2:That's not what we're talking about here, because that's not what the poet's inferring. The Hebrew term for fool here, the word nabal, isn't a reference to how someone might lack intelligence, or they're stupid, or they should be belittled. No. It refers to a person who has no perception of and makes no consideration of ethical claims or truth. And what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it looks like the person who says, I can do what I want. The person who says, I can believe and say whatever I want, when I want to. I can treat others how I want, which is a perspective that goes against the core of the Hebrew scriptures, where in Torah, God imagines a people more just, more equitable, more fair. And then in the wisdom literature, God instructs those people on the means to honest and generous living. And then in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, men and women in history came time and time again to the Hebrew people to remind them of the kind of community that God had encouraged them to begin building.
Speaker 2:And this is why, as Walter Brueggemann notes, the Hebrew practices of lament, as they kind of appear in this poem, they're never there merely as a religious gesture, but as an important and a direct link to social processes. Or put another way, how in a Hebrew imagination of the world, as Karleen Mandofel says, the poetry of the Psalms, it's all about the immediacy of experience, not about the systemization of ideas. See, because the Hebrew poet realized that the most dangerous people in the world aren't those who contend that there's scientific evidence against God's existence. No. It's the practical or functional atheists that they warn us to be wary of.
Speaker 2:The person who speaks of God being full of love and yet fears their neighbor from another culture. The person who thinks that their power or their history, their position, their faith gives them permission to abuse somebody else or to forget somebody else, to act as though their actions don't impact somebody else. The person who has resources and yet frustrates the plans of the poor, the poet shrieks today. Which is why in a world where it's so easy for any of us to say one thing and do another, to be moral with our mouths or with our social media posts, but to be deeply immoral in the way that we live, In a world where religious tradition and text are today being used to oppose those who are at risk, in a world where people speak of God in ways that do not look like Jesus, perhaps it's only right if you have come to the place where you realize that you cannot believe in a god like that. Or maybe you've suffered some pain or some rejection because you've been labeled different or difficult or because you wanted people to be included, and you wanted victims to be safe, and you wanted the world to be more like you see it in the scripture.
Speaker 2:And today, this poet beautifully speaks for you and reassures you that refusing to believe in a God that rejects or marginalizes or pushes away, that doesn't make you a fool. But in fact, that's the right kind of atheism. While in the same breath, the poet invites us to take up the work and the poetry of finding God present in the details of our world, especially with those in need. Telling stories in which, if God exists at all, it's as a refuge for those who are far from home. So I hope you'll take up the courage to use the psalms this week.
Speaker 2:And along with the other poets, the people that you use to compose a life that's meaningful, I hope you'll find a faith there as you build it, a faith that sparks life in you and life in the people who are around you. May you learn to read your life as riddled with divine enjambments, marked by the poetry of grace in which sorrow and difficulty and darkness always hold the promise of the next line. And may you sense the courage to live as though there is no God who doesn't welcome, restore, and transform anyone and everyone's story. Let's pray. God, in the mystery of this community, in the mystery of this moment, we acknowledge that we are present to each other and we are present to you.
Speaker 2:And we ask that you would help us as we learn to build and carefully and patiently shape our story of faith. Together, yes, but then in our own individual pursuits, Lead us in this search for poets and voices, people who can give some expression to the way that we see you at work. And I pray that we would find the Psalms an ally in that, even as we learn to trust that the truths you speak over us are ever and always coming. And maybe today, we feel as though we're far from the divine. Maybe we feel as though the lines of our story have somehow come to a stop.
Speaker 2:I pray that you give us hope to hold, that the true poetry of what it means to live a life and a life with God is to trust that the next line is coming, and that it might already be present to us in ways that we cannot see or imagine. And I ask too that you would help us as we try to be a community, and we try to be people who let go of theology that we have seen be harmful in the world, and instead embrace your work for the renewing of all people and all things. We pray and hope this in the name of Christ. Amen.