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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:And while we're all gathering back here, I will tell you a little bit about myself. I haven't been up here for a while, so I thought I will yeah. And I haven't met a lot of you, so I'll just share a bit. My name is Yelena, and I am one of the pastors on the team here. And it's always, always a joy for me to be with you in this space on a Sunday morning.
Speaker 2:What I do during the week mainly revolves around helping our community build meaningful connections and invest in relationships. So I work with our groups, I help people organize dinners and other community events, and I also support our volunteers who work with our local partners, Pneuma, Mustard Seed, and In From the Cold. So if you've recently signed up for a group, you'll be hearing from me shortly because we are about to start our new season. I would still consider myself a new Calgarian. Dennis and I have been living in Calgary for two years now, and it's definitely starting to feel like home, especially after I discovered that a lot of vegetables and berries that I grew up with in Central Asia grow here too.
Speaker 2:Sorrel, kohlrabi, sour cherries, gooseberries, all those strange things. Thrive here. I was so pumped. Also, it's been a year since I joined the team and became part of this community. And let me tell you, I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2:You are such a gift for Dennis and me. Thank you. Well, over the past seven weeks, we've been living in the book of Psalms and learning different tools for reading and engaging with biblical poetry. And today, we will be looking at Psalm 65. A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with Kevin Hill, who walked us through Psalm 14 at our Inglewood location, and he asked me, what kind of Psalm is yours?
Speaker 2:And I told him, Honestly, I'm not sure yet. Let's see. It's a praise sum, and a prayer, and maybe hymn, and there's a bit of confession in it, and Thanksgiving for good harvest, and it's also about creation, and has a bunch of nature poetry. Well, it turns out that biblical scholars have also struggled with the precise identification of the Psalm genre. And the consensus today is that, originally, there were two independent poems that were put together at a later point.
Speaker 2:So basically, it is a hymn and a prayer, or a prayer that turns into a hymn, depending on what tense you'll choose to read for all those verbs in the second half of it. But the fascinating thing for me about this psalm is how the two parts, that at first glance seem totally disconnected, actually belong together and tell one story. And how this merging creates one beautiful vision of God's ever expanding grace. And I will try my best to convince you of that today as we work our way through this sum together. So today, we will be talking about imagination and metaphors, expanding vision, God of power, and what it means to inhabit a place.
Speaker 2:Would you join me in prayer now, and then we will dive in. Our loving God, as you breathe life into us and hold our world together, as you watch over those who find themselves on the margins, as you draw near to those who feel lost and who are hurting, would your truth and grace and love find way to us all? And as we sift through the words of these ancient poets who held on to your goodness even when life was hard and who believed that your beauty will fill the earth, may we find comfort and hope in their words and see how across time and space, our longings and our dreams are so much like theirs. Be with us, Lord. In your name, we pray.
Speaker 2:Amen. Well, speaking about vegetables that thrive and grow really well in Alberta, Northrop Fry, a Canadian literary theorist, says that there is always something vegetable about the imagination, something sharply limited in range, meaning that imagination is always rooted in and grows from a very specific experience of people and place. He believes that cultures, thought forms, metaphors are always local, and that this connection to place and time is reflected in the literature we create. And this is such a fascinating idea, how here, this place, this room, this city, the river that flows through it, this province, and this country are all part of you. Think about all the ways you have been shaped by place, and all these places, all those places you take for granted that have contributed to how you see the world, the landscapes you grew up with, the foods, the people, your local shops, your morning commute, or even the park in your neighborhood that you really like.
Speaker 2:And this organic nature of human imagination is important to remember, especially when reading such ancient collection of poetry as the Book of Psalms. The poets, songwriters, and editors that created this book inhabited a particular place at a very particular time. And what we find today in the language and structure of biblical poetry reflects the imagination of the Hebrew people and how the ancient Near Eastern cultures saw the world. And of course, that imagination is not immediately accessible, partly because it is communicated through certain metaphors that sound so strange to our ear today. And a good chunk of poetry we find in the Bible, especially in the Psalms and the prophets, distills and creatively reworks and reimagines a lot of imagery from the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.
Speaker 2:These poets just love drawing on the wealth of metaphors found in the creation narrative because they want to help their community see how their foundational story, what they believe to be true about the world, has shaped their life as it is today, and also how it can help them to envision their future. And if we can recognize some of those images and what they point to, it will help us to read a lot of biblical poetry better. And that would amount to about 30% of our Bible, so I think it's worth the investment. So in Psalm 65, we find two major metaphors that draw on the creation narrative: word as a temple and world as a garden. An Old Testament scholar and one of my former professors at Regent College, Ian Proven, writes this.
Speaker 2:Temples in the ancient Near East were designed primarily as residencies for the gods rather than as places of worship. They were built on sacred spaces, usually upon a river or a stream of flowing water, and their ordered arrangement and decoration inside mirrored the order and fertility of the cosmos as a whole. So what we are reading in Genesis chapter one and two is the story of how the Hebrew people imagined creation, but it can also be read as the story describing the building of a cosmic temple, How God brings order to the formless nonbeing, tames the chaotic waters, and creates an ordered universe, where the earth is fruitful, where there is a garden with a river flowing through it as a source of life for the whole land, and how finally, when everything is ready, human beings are given this temple garden to live in, to enjoy, and to care for. And today, we tend to think about God very conceptually. God is an idea, or God is a force, or God is an invisible principle behind all existing things.
Speaker 2:But for ancient peoples, God was almost human like. God had a house where God lived. God had a garden where God created. So as we work through the Psalm today, keep this temple and garden metaphors at the back of your mind and see how the poet uses them to tell a story. Okay.
Speaker 2:We're set for now. Let's get to the Psalm. Psalm 65, a psalm of David, a song. And the word psalm itself means song, and the word used for song here usually refers to something sung in the chorus. And most likely, what we have here is a liturgical composition that was meant to be sung by a group of people in a temple.
Speaker 2:So imagine a choir, and this is what it sings. Praise awaits you, o God, in Zion. To you, our vows will be fulfilled. You who answer prayer, to you, all people will come. When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave our transgressions.
Speaker 2:Blessed are those you choose and bring near to live in your courts. We are filled with the good things of your house, of your holy temple. And right away, the poet takes us to the Jerusalem Temple, and we hear about people living a good life in the courts, in the house, and at the very heart of where God is. But what's really interesting here is that the first verse, praise awaits you, all God in Zion, literally reads us, to you silence is praise, God in Zion. So now we have a song meant to be sung by a choir in the context of worship in the temple, but the very first words of it renounce the idea of singing.
Speaker 2:And then, it's not that surprising how some manuscripts and translations try to smooth it over and turn the idea of silence as praise into praise that is forthcoming. And I just love it how in the middle of this collection of songs of praise, we have a song that claims that silence is praise too, and how it challenges and expands our imagination of worship. You see, in the worldview of the ancient Near East, the gods, the deities that lived in those temples hungered for worship. And they created humans to work for them, to praise them, and to meet all their needs. But for Hebrew worshippers standing in the Jerusalem Temple, hearing that silence is praised to God would signal a very different relationship that this God wants to have with people made in the divine image.
Speaker 2:And I think it is a beautiful reminder for us that being real with where we are with our faith, even if at times it looks like silence, is actually true praise. And I'm sure we've all had this experience when there is not much left in us, and we don't feel like we can be fully present to God in the same way as we sometimes struggle to be fully present to other people in our lives, even to the people we really love. And here, the poet reflects this back to us and says, God sees you so differently in those moments. Do not try to be what you cannot be. God does not need it.
Speaker 2:You are deeply loved. And maybe at this particular juncture in your life, you feel spent, and you have no words left for prayer, and all the affirmations and songs of God's goodness sound hollow. And maybe the maximum you can do is show up to church or maybe your home group and slip away right after. Or maybe something happened, and you've been shaken up to the point that you are not even sure how to do this you and God thing anymore. Well, hear this.
Speaker 2:God honors your silence, and your integrity is honoring to God. And the divine is never far from you in your need to just be. So be quiet. Be still. Bring your silence, and let it be your worship.
Speaker 2:And since the worship here is not tied up to a location but to the God who hears prayer, the poet says, all people will come to you, and knocks down the metaphorical walls, and removes the gates and lets everyone searching for God in. And the worshipers are reminded that not only their worship, but their temple too is much larger than they imagine. It is a symbol and a sacrament of inclusion. And that from the very beginning, the good life did not belong to a particular ethnic group or those who would fit the specific requirements. It was meant to be for every human being made in the image of their creator and for all living creatures too.
Speaker 2:All people here actually stands for all flesh in Hebrew. It is the same word used in the flood story, book of Genesis again, and same word used for Noah and his whole family and all the animals saved in the ark from the floodwaters. Now, sin does not get a lot of attention in the Psalm because its primary focus is on the experience of wholeness and flourishing found in the temple garden. But I find it interesting how the poet talks here about sin and forgiveness and expands what would have been a common understanding of both. So when we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave our transgressions can also be read as, when words of iniquity overpower us, our transgressions you forgive.
Speaker 2:In the Hebrew text, the word dabar, in plural, is placed before iniquity, It has multiple meanings and can be translated as words, things, deeds, or matters. And some translations go for deeds of iniquity or just omit that word altogether, while others believe that it should be retained. So Beth Tanner, a scholar who specializes in Hebrew poetry, argues that in the Psalm, we have the interplay of hearing and speaking. People quietly listen, people speak their vows, God listens, God speaks forgiveness. So she believes that the words of iniquity is a better translation.
Speaker 2:And I would add that it also captures our human experience of sin better too. Because, look, whenever we steer away from what's best for us, either intentionally or not, When trust is broken, when we make choices that hurt other people, or someone else harms us, when we push against what's good and true and beautiful, even when we know we need it, or when we're complacent and walk away while knowing that we could have done something about the situation. It is not our actions that overwhelm us, and usually not even the consequences with which we end up. We just learn to live with them. I believe that it's what we come to tell ourselves about ourselves in the process.
Speaker 2:The old scripts we fall back into whenever something is triggered, or the hurtful messages we carry inside for years, or the shame we allow to pile up, and to eventually convince us that we are no good and we do not deserve to be loved. And as the time goes by, these words we tell ourselves create the worlds we then start to inhabit, and this disempowers us and pulls us even further away from healing. And the poet says, you do not have to live out of that story. Only in two other instances in the book of Psalms, divine forgiveness is described using the same verb, kaphar, which means to atone for sin, or more precisely, to wash the guilt away without any accompanying ritual from the guilty one. Kafar happens when God becomes the one who takes all the guilt in, and the guilty one gets a fresh start.
Speaker 2:So the traditional temple practices required some kind of sacrifice for the guilt to be removed so that the divine human relationship will be restored. But here, we see people who come into God's presence without a song, without a sacrifice, and even without a proper prayer of confession. The only thing they do is whisper, these burdens have become too much for us to carry. And then they throw themselves on grace. And God says, give me your burdens, and I will give you rest.
Speaker 2:Alright. So far, we've looked at different ways. The psalm expands the imagination of worship, how the Jerusalem Temple is a symbol of God's world that includes all creation, and how the story of sin, the words of distortion, get overwritten by grace. And so far, we stayed in the first half of this psalm that zooms in on everything to do with the restoration of the divine image bearers, people. Now let's start transitioning into the second half, which zooms out to give us a larger picture of what restored harmony looks like for the whole creation.
Speaker 2:You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds, God, our savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the father's seas. And here, again, we see how biblical poetry creates meaning by using parallel constructions, when two halves or three parts of the line complete and emphasize a point. We're going to see a lot of it in this little section. So here, the parallel lines, all the ends of the earth and all of the farther seas give us an idea of how geographically vast and overarching God's presence is. Who formed the mountains by your power, having armed yourself with strength?
Speaker 2:Another parallel, who steal the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves, and the turmoil of the nations. And the image of the divine warrior conquering the chaotic waters was quite common in the ancient Near Eastern cosmogony. For the people whose imagination was rooted in their experience of living in the semi desert, a stormy sea with its really high waves was the epitome of instability and danger. Sea was the place where the sea gods lived and went to battle to throw the universe into chaos and destruction. So here, the metaphor of God stealing the roaring seas communicates that creation is safe and under control.
Speaker 2:It is not a life and death situation anymore. In fact, it's only about life. And the comparison of the riding nations with the roaring waves completes this description of chaos. The instigators of conflict also push against creation and do not want it to be a safe place where everyone can thrive. And today, we aren't really scared of water as something that will put our life in danger or will threaten the way we operate as a society.
Speaker 2:But every evening, when I tell Google to play the news, what I hear often feels like a seastorm to me. And I like listening to several different broadcasters and news podcasts on the same day, just to give a bit of a different perspective on what's going on. And I don't know if you can relate to this, or maybe it's just me, but a lot of subtle and not so subtle messages from different places around the world, and even from here, seem to revolve around power and fear. Who wants power? Who has power?
Speaker 2:Who's after power? How power gets used and most often misused? And what happens when someone tries to stand up to it? And the messages of fear are usually closely associated with those of power, or even driven by them. Who should we be afraid of?
Speaker 2:Who's the enemy today? And how can we resist the threat they pose to our version of safe and good world? And in that way, we are not that different from the people who composed these texts and wanted to have a warrior god on their side who could smash those godless nations and make sure no outsider gets access to our blessings. And I mean, those ancient texts we open up every Sunday are in many ways a case study on human experience of fear and power. And the story of Jesus and the gospels really turns these things upside down.
Speaker 2:But even in the psalm, there is a hint that things do not have to be that way, and that divine power is not about who shouldn't be let in, but rather who is still on the outside. The Hebrew word used here for nations is not goyim, which was usually used to describe and emphasize the otherness of non Israelite people groups. It's le ummim, which has a more inclusive meaning, and it means a gathering of different ethnic groups under a larger geopolitical nation umbrella. So the idea here is not about God squashing all the differences. It's about the vision of the world where people are not othered based on what makes them different.
Speaker 2:And God's original intention for creating the world and Jesus' emptying himself of divine power to renew all creation, both point to the same thing. Creation is meant to be a safe and good place where everyone can thrive. And this is where the poet takes us out of the temple into the garden, Or I like to picture it as a family farm and says, see, this land and its abundance are the signs that God is with us. You care for the land and water it. You enrich it abundantly.
Speaker 2:So we're not hearing this cosmic language of battle and laying the foundations of the world anymore. We're looking at a small piece of land that people work to grow some food in a very dry climate, where their harvest entirely depends on rainfall. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it. And here's another cue for you to imagine a cosmic temple built on a river that flows through the garden and waters everything, and you dranch its furrows and level its ridges. You soften it with showers and bless its crops.
Speaker 2:Notice the contrast as the poem moves from those raging waves and seas to the soft, life giving rains and springs, from this warrior god to this farmer god. You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the wilderness overflow. The hills are closed with gladness. The meadows are covered with flocks, and the valleys are mantled with grain.
Speaker 2:They shout for joy and sing. When talking about reading poetry in scriptures, biblical scholar Robert Alter, whom we quoted a number of times through the series, points out an important feature of biblical Hebrew. It does not use a lot of abstractions, And the spiritual reality is always connected and expressed in the physical experience. And the divine purposes are implemented in social and political realms. So remember, these Hebrew poets were peasants who lived off the land.
Speaker 2:And it could be that this half of the song was a prayer for rain during an extremely dry season, And then it became a thanksgiving hymn to be used during the harvest festival in the fall. And later, it was merged with the first poem to make a whole new one. The one that draws on the imagination of the creation story, and the one that begins with personal experience of restoration and then points to embodied neighborliness, and then ends with a worship service in a local field. Well, I know we're in Alberta, but I bet only a handful of people in this room grow grain and raise cattle. And yet we all live off this land and some other magical land that produces our avocados and bananas.
Speaker 2:And while there's not much room to explore, what it means for us to care for this land as divine image bearers, I want to at least point us in that direction. In her book, Why Are We Here? A Canadian writer and theologian, Mary Jo Leddy, reflects on what it means for us today to live together in this land we call Canada. She explores the imagination that the indigenous people had for this land. She looks at how the first and subsequent generations of settlers saw it.
Speaker 2:And she also looks at it through the eyes of newcomers and refugee children she works with in Toronto. And her guiding question, why are we here, gets answered differently at different points in our history, to survive, to own, to consume, to mine, to manage, and to belong. But what really resonated with me is this metaphor of caring as inhabiting. And for Mary Jolletty, inhabiting a place is really about two things: cultivating gratitude for this vast and beautiful gift of space that we all hold in common, and taking on the weight of where we live and becoming responsible for it. And I realized that inhabiting a place will look different for all of us.
Speaker 2:Some of us have lived here for a really long time, and others like me are only making their home here. But maybe this week, you can be intentionally mindful of where you spend your time and what you see around. How is this city a gift? What is it about living in your neighborhood that gives you joy? And in what small ways you and your family and your children shape it to be what it is?
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a cup of coffee you get every Saturday from your local coffee shop, and the barista knows exactly how you like it, and you've built this relationship with this person. Or perhaps you're that kind person who lifts up an October line bike or scooter on the sidewalk. Or when you eat, look at the cucumbers and tomatoes on your plate and think how, in a very tangible way, you are connected to the farmers and the greenhouses around Calgary and other parts of our country that produce them, and how the very soil of this land is now becoming part of you. And I will leave you with Mary Jo Lady's words. This much is still possible.
Speaker 2:If we take on, consciously and together, active care for this particular place on Earth, then we will discover what holds the immense diversity of this country together. We hold a street in common, a neighborhood, a city, a village, a park, a vastness. We are not owners but inhabitants of this place. We are inhabitants. Why are you here?
Speaker 2:Here I am. Here we are. So as you head into this week, go with the assurance that the divine holds you in your silence, that the place where you find yourself planted is a gift of a good God, and may you inhabit it well. Let's pray. Oh, God, creator of mountains and green meadows, bubbling springs and stormy seas, always too big to be contained and described by our human language, but never too big to pay attention to our heart's desires and the fears that keep us hiding.
Speaker 2:O Jesus, the hope of the world in whom the fullness of God dwells. Ground us in this place we inhabit. Show us what it means to live a life of care in this community, in this city, in this country. Oh, holy spirit, the challenger of the truth will like to believe. May we listen to your voice and know what is good and true and beautiful for us and for this land.
Speaker 2:Breathe in us the joy of being alive in this place and at this time. Watch over us and keep us from all harm. Amen.