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Jesus knew the Psalms. Paul knew the Psalms.
In fact, the entire early Christian community was steeped in the same Psalms that have served as the central prayer and hymnbook for the church since its beginning-until now.
Reading, studying, and praying the Psalms is God’s means for teaching us what it means to be human: how to express our emotions and yearnings, how to reconcile our anger and our compassion, how to see our story in light of God’s sweeping narrative of salvation. Our intent this summer is to help provide the tools for understanding and incorporating these crucial verses into our own lives by exploring 10 hymns from the books of the Psalms.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
This morning, my name is Jeremy. Actually, every morning it is, but welcome here. Part of the team here. We have been in the Psalms all summer, and we have today, and then we have next week, and then that's it before we shift gears and we jump into our launch series for year three here at Commons. Now, that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:Our new journals are off to the printers. They will be here available on September 11, and that will lay out everything that we have planned for the coming year. But if you are new, we do still have some copies of this year's journal available at the connection center. Now there's only two weeks left in that journal, but it will give you a ton of information about who we are and where we're headed. So you're welcome, please, after the service to head by and pick one up.
Speaker 1:Let's be honest, we've got 10, maybe 15 copies left, and we need to get rid of those before 1,200 copies show up in a week for the next year. So by all means, take one before you leave. But before we jump into Psalm 66 today, I do wanna mention the prayer teams that Joel mentioned earlier. We have always valued the chance to gather and pray together as a community here at Commons. We try to keep that low key.
Speaker 1:Prayer does not need to be a big production, but we will often gather the elders to anoint people with oil and pray for them. We do have a prayer ministry. If you have anything that you need, prayed about with people who will do that for you. But having a team, solid, mature people who are available to pray with us in person on Sundays, I think this could be a really significant piece of the puzzle here at Commons. And so if that's interesting to you, then by all means, please come and talk to us after the service.
Speaker 1:We would love to have you participate in that. K. Psalm 66 this morning. So let's read this, and then we'll pray before we jump into it. Shout for joy to God all the earth.
Speaker 1:Sing the glory of his name. Make his praise glorious. Say to God, how awesome are your deeds, so great is your power that your enemies cringe before you. All the earth bows down to you. They sing praise to you.
Speaker 1:They sing the praises of your name. Come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind. He turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the waters on foot. Come, let us rejoice him.
Speaker 1:He rules forever by his powers. His eyes watch the nations. Let not the rebellious rise up against him. Praise our God, all peoples. Let the sound of his praise be heard for he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping.
Speaker 1:For you God, you tested us, refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let people ride over our heads. We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance. I will come into your temple with burnt offerings and fulfill my vows to you, vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble.
Speaker 1:I will sacrifice fat animals to you, an offering of rams. I will offer bulls and goats. Come and hear all you who fear God. Let me tell you what he has done for me. I cried out to him with his my mouth.
Speaker 1:His praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But God has surely listened and heard my prayer. Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me. Psalm 66.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. Lord God, help us to be truly thankful in the midst of everything that we have been given. Forgive us for those moments where our abundance blinds us from the needs and poverty that sits around us. Heal us if that abundance has in some way hid from us the generosity from which everything has been given. May we come to understand and accept every gift as miracle and blessing from you.
Speaker 1:And yet, as we offer our thanks today through this psalm, we recognize that there are those among us here who struggle to see your goodness in their lives right now. It's clouded and foggy and faded with the very real concerns that work their way into our lives. And so may our offer of strength and thanks be strength and not burden for those who hurt. May our words of praise be surrogate and not salt for those who struggle. May we speak together the words that may be hard to voice as individuals, trusting that we will come to see your grace in time.
Speaker 1:For all that you have given to us, may we now look for opportunities to share that with those around us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright. Psalm 66 today.
Speaker 1:Now, I feel like I have said this for every psalm that I have taught through this summer, but again, I have found myself fascinated by this poem. And at least part of that is because this does seem to be two separate poems that have been fused together at some point. Now, most scholars think verses one to 12 and then verses 13 to 20 may have at one time been separate. And even if it always was one song, there's a very clear shift in focus that happens at that point in the Psalm. So verses one to 12 is all about praising God.
Speaker 1:God of the universe, God of the waters, the God of guidance. And then in verse 13, there's this shift that happens. We're bringing sacrifices to God, telling people about what God has done in our lives. There's even a shift from second person to first person at that point in the poem. Now clearly, these are not incongruous ideas at all.
Speaker 1:It makes a lot of sense to pull them together, but it does seem like they may have originated separately. Unfortunately, the inscription for this psalm really doesn't do much to help us here. It just says, a psalm, a song. And so we have no indication about who wrote it or what the occasion was for its writing. And that means that this is a text that we really simply have to engage as it comes to us as a single piece of poetry.
Speaker 1:And so that's our plan today as we walk through. Now, the first stanza, this is verses one to four. They have a joyous, exuberant, really incredible opening to the singing, and it's really nice. Right? I mean, some of the psalms that we have worked our way through this summer have started with a decidedly dour tone, so it's nice to just be a little excited for once.
Speaker 1:However, that's interesting to reflect on some of the musical choices in our own lives, both here in church and perhaps in the car or the shower or wherever it is that you like to listen to music to. I'm not gonna judge you for that. You do your thing. But reflecting on the diversity with which the Psalms are written made me think about our music this week. Now we're all well aware of my fascination with Pearl Jam.
Speaker 1:Right? Otherwise known as the greatest band who ever lived. So I won't belabor that point. But I will say this, like all good Canadians, I spent a week ago Saturday night watching the Tragically Hip. If you're not aware of what I'm talking about, then obviously, you were out of the country, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Allow me to explain. At one of the most beloved Canadian rock bands of all time played their final concert in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario, while our national broadcaster carried that concert live across the country for free. And the reason this was their last concert was because the lead singer, Gord Downey, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. That was a great show. If you follow my Instagram, you saw my son rocking out to the concert.
Speaker 1:Hashtag that kids got moves like Downey. But it was incredible to watch as thousands of people there in that room and millions and people across the country simultaneously swung from pure joy and celebration at the history of this band that has been part of our lives for thirty three years now. And then to tears and grief as we watched Gord Downey sing and realized the significance of this moment. For him as a person and for us as fans, There is beauty in joy, but there is also a profound brilliance in grief and loss and our recognition of mortality. Now part of what the tragically hip remind us, part of what the Psalms show us, is that the unevenness of life is important.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, there is a sense that church is the place that we go and worship is the thing that we do to escape the pain of our lives. And sometimes that's true. And sometimes we need respite and release, but worship is not always meant to be happy. You don't need to smile when you come to church. Now if church makes you smile or singing lifts your heart, then that's great.
Speaker 1:I wanna celebrate that with you. But by no means are the Psalms always this sunny. And so when we read, shout for joy to God all the earth, sing the glory of his name, make his praise glorious. This is not a denial of what hurts. It is simply an invitation to add something else to our story.
Speaker 1:And you can actually see this in a really neat way here in the second stanza. Now verse five says, come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind. He turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the waters on foot. Come, let us rejoice him.
Speaker 1:Now, first of all, this is sort of an oblique reference here. It's clearly meant to evoke the memory of the Exodus. The Jews are in slavery in Egypt and they cry out, and God hears them. And he has Moses confront Pharaoh who initially lets the people go, but then changes his mind and decides to chase them down. And this leads to the scene at the Red Sea where God parts the waters and the Israelites walk through toward freedom on dry land.
Speaker 1:Not many have argued that that is the central story of the Old Testament, that God is on the side of the oppressed, whoever they are. God is the one who liberates and frees and rescues us. That's who he is. So that's the surface reference here. But if you remember all the way back to the very first week of this series, I talked about paying attention to water in the Psalms.
Speaker 1:You see, water was the symbol for chaos and danger in a lot of ancient Semitic cultures. And water was the untamable force of nature from which God brought order. So Genesis one, in the beginning, the earth was formless and void. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters. So where the Genesis story actually chooses to start is with the earth in this formless, chaotic, wet state covered in water, completely uninhabitable.
Speaker 1:And from out of that, God brings land and plants and animals and humans and order and worship. And so when the psalmist says, he turned the sea into dry land, What she's talking about here is the cosmic story of the divine creation of the world. This is the biggest story you can possibly imagine. And she then connects that to the shared memory of the Hebrew peoples they passed through the waters on foot in the Exodus. She she wants to remind them that the creative force of the universe is also the divine personality who heard the cries of the Hebrew people.
Speaker 1:These stories are connected. But look what she does next. He, meaning God, did that so they, the Hebrew people, could pass through. Now we should celebrate. There's this really neat conscious movement that the writer is making here.
Speaker 1:At the most grand story of cosmic proportions is connected to the central memory of God's people, is now connected to the personal experience of those who read the words of this poem. That that's her point. And and some of it gets lost in the translation here a bit. Because this rendering in the NIV, they passed through, so come let us worship. That makes sense in English, but it loses some of the oomph in the poetry.
Speaker 1:Because what it actually says in Hebrew is they passed through and there we rejoiced. So the psalmist is consciously putting you, the reader, in the story there on the banks rejoicing in God's goodness as the people walk through. And that's her point in some sense. That in community, the goodness of God, wherever it has been shown to whomever it has been shown, is now suddenly shown to you. We we talked about something like this back in our series on Romans this spring.
Speaker 1:Paul says at one point, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is being reported all over the world. I hear good things are happening in your world in Rome even though that's not a church that I planted, and that makes me smile, says Paul. Well, the psalmist wants you to know that the incredible creative generosity that shaped the cosmos is the same generative care that liberated the Hebrews, is the same divine ear that stoops to listen when you call out to God. All of that is your story. And so in Christ, it is perfectly appropriate for you to appropriate blessing wherever you see it.
Speaker 1:When you are scrolling through Facebook and you see that little video that touches your heart, it's okay to thank God for that. And when you hear good news from your neighbor about what's going on in their life, it's okay to thank God about that. When you have a friend who says just the right thing in just the right moment, it's okay to thank God for that too. And not not in the cheesy sense of believing that God is always hiding behind the bushes and pulling the strings on everything, But simply because whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure or lovely or admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, Paul says, This comes from the same divine source as all that is good in the universe. This is what the psalmist has in mind when she connects the cosmos to the exodus to your experiencing of rejoicing on the banks with the people of God.
Speaker 1:It's all the same story. Now now the question is, well, what do we do with that when we go back to our conversation earlier about the inconsistency of life? I mean, does this mean that because there is good in the cosmos, we should smile even when there's hurt in our personal world? The answer is, of course not. One simply does not cancel the other out.
Speaker 1:That's not how it works. You know this. You can be joyously celebrating one thing in your life even as you are deeply pained by another. Neither of those lose their significance or their meaning for you. And so the recognition that this psalm brings simply means that we have the opportunity to expand the scope of our story.
Speaker 1:You can hurt deeply about the specific even as you acknowledge the goodness of God that surrounds us everywhere. And that does not need to be a contradiction. In fact, despite how hard that can be to hold that tension in certain moments, this is our story. That's why it's really interesting to see where the psalmist goes next. Because the next stanza says, praise our God all peoples.
Speaker 1:Let the sound of his praise be heard. He has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping, but then listen to this. For you, God, tested us, you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let people ride over our heads.
Speaker 1:We went through fire and water, but you, you brought us to a place of abundance. Now, this is not a poet who is unaware of the task that she is asking her audience. Because if, like most of us, you still struggle with the idea of celebrating someone else's salvation while you're in pain, the author now dives into that moment with you. At first she says, the universe, the exodus, your story, it's all connected. Rejoice, be glad.
Speaker 1:But now it's like she says, okay, I get it. The cosmos is beautiful, but you're still in pain. And this is the really neat twist that the psalm makes. It starts with the stuff that we want to sing about. Creation and salvation and joy, what it seems to be saying, however, is that there's actually something much deeper that we can celebrate.
Speaker 1:Perhaps, we could say it this way, that God is with us through the journey no matter what. So two things here. First, this idea that God brought us into prison. That doesn't mean God put you there. The word is actually bow in the original language.
Speaker 1:It's actually a very ancient Hebrew word that later gets superseded by another synonym. So you don't see it happen very much in the scriptures. And it comes from the Akkadian. It has the idea of to go with or maybe even to go ahead of someone. So you brought us into prison is maybe more like you walked with us into prison.
Speaker 1:Maybe even you went ahead of us. You you went with us into the places where we should not have been. And I'm intrigued by the poetic use of this term because actually in the Acadian, the word has a dual meaning. It means to go with and to return from. And perhaps, the poet is reaching for that duality there.
Speaker 1:The second, the word abundance at the end of this stanza, this is the word in Hebrew. And its primary use is actually intoxication. So drunkenness, saturation, satisfaction, that's what it means. But again, there's a more ancient meaning in this word, and it's idea of quenching a thirst. It's what it originally meant, which you can see why they get to drunkenness.
Speaker 1:But it was used about drinking when you're thirsty. It was actually used of irrigating crops too. So it wasn't abundance in the sense of excess or luxury as much as life and goodness and having everything that you need. We went through fire and water, and you took us to a place where there was enough to drink. That's that's what she's saying, which is interesting because that's the payoff.
Speaker 1:Right? I went through fire and water, and now there's enough to drink. And I and I wonder about that when I read it and I think of what abundance means in my life. Because I'll be honest here. For me, everything that I need feels like the minimum, not the reason for celebration.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, having what I need, that's the starting line. Food, shelter, water, Apple Watch, like that's that's just getting started. And yet this author who connects the cosmos to the exodus to my story, this author who says that God will walk with me even into the places that I should not have been, Now says the payoff, the celebration, the reason that I should sing a song like this is enough clean water to satisfy my thirst. That that's where God is interested in taking, you and I.
Speaker 1:And I think that's helpful, because I think it forces me to reset my expectations around blessing. And it reminds me that there's a lot of good around me that I often lose sight of. There's this book that I read recently. It was called Flourish, a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. And despite the bombastic subtitle, it was, to be honest, quite a good book, but not particularly new or visionary.
Speaker 1:It was really just a book about mindfulness. But in it, the writer says, he says, gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying. Because when we feel gratitude, we benefit again from the pleasant memory of a positive event in our life. Also, when we express gratitude to another, we strengthen our relationship with them. But for sound evolutionary reasons, most of us are not nearly as good at dwelling on good as we are on the bad.
Speaker 1:Those of our ancestors who spent a lot of time basking in the sunshine of good events when they should have been preparing for the next disaster did not survive the ice age. And so to overcome our brain's natural catastrophic bent, we need to work on and practice this skill of thinking about what goes well. So here's what the author suggests at one point. He says, every night for the next week, do it for one week and try it. Set aside ten minutes before you go to bed, and write down three things that went well today and why they went well.
Speaker 1:Now, you can use a journal or an iPad, sit in front of your computer, it doesn't matter. But his suggestion is that it's important to have a record of what you write. Now, nothing needs to be particularly earth shattering. One of the examples he gives is this, my husband picked up my favorite ice cream on the way home from work. You're welcome, Rachel.
Speaker 1:I didn't do that by the way, but I will today. But then next he says, beside each positive memory, you answer the question why, as in why did this happen? And so for the example, if you wrote down your husband picked up ice cream, you could write because Jeremy is really, really thoughtful, Rachel. She's way more thoughtful than I am, but that's okay. But his thesis here is that writing out, and actually particularly the why, helps to sink it into our heart.
Speaker 1:And the pattern of doing it nightly creates a habit in our rhythms, and the rhythm of gratitude will help us to see all that there is to be grateful for around us. Now, it can be really awkward at first. I've done this for a while now. And it does feel weird reminding yourself about seemingly insignificant things. And yet, what I've come to appreciate about the exercise is that I'm starting to realize that the things that come to mind aren't insignificant.
Speaker 1:They are the enough to drink that I need in that moment. Because sometimes the thing that we need is not the thing. It's the awareness of everything that we already have. And this is part of what the Psalms offer to us, this awareness. God is with you as you go.
Speaker 1:May you simply come to recognize him as you do. And yet, this is also the point where the psalm makes a shift. As I mentioned earlier, this is where a lot of scholars believe two separate poems have been fused together at some point by an editor. Now, it's probably not very productive to get into a technical details of that argument this morning, but I agree it's probably likely that this is what has happened at some point. What's really interesting about that though is to wonder about why these two two poems have been put together.
Speaker 1:Because so far, we've heard the author say that the cosmos, the exodus, and your story are all part of the grand story of God. And the grand story of God is really actually about the divine presence that walks with you through everyday life and helps you to become aware of what's good. But now, the poet says, I will come to your temple with burnt offerings and fulfill my vows to you. Vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble. I will sacrifice fat animals to you.
Speaker 1:An offering of rams, I will offer bulls and goats. And first of all here, fat animals, rams, bulls, and goats, this is an absurd offering. There is nowhere that God demands or even to be honest condones this type of excess in the Bible. There's a few commentators that try to make the argument that this could be the voice of a king perhaps, offering sacrifices on behalf of the people, on behalf of the nation, a communal sacrifice. But that interpretation runs into problems because everything here is first person singular.
Speaker 1:It's I, not we. And so far more likely is that this is simply not meant to be read literally. It's figurative language. It's hyperbole. The poet is using the language of sacrifice to say, God, I will give you everything.
Speaker 1:That's the point. And it's precisely that shift from you to us and now to I that makes a lot of scholars think we've moved into a new poem. And yet that's kind of a compelling narrative, isn't it? We went from the creation of the universe to the exodus of the Hebrew people, to us together rejoicing on the beach in God's goodness. We've heard how God walked with us through fire and water and brought us to a place of abundance, and now I come to God's temple.
Speaker 1:And I remember my vows. And I bring my sacrifice, my response to God. Mean, these may originally have been two poems, and I think that's likely, but they have not been haphazardly thrown together. There's a movement and a progression, a story that's being told here. When it is designed to take a story from way out there and to drive it step by step slowly down into here.
Speaker 1:That's really what this poem has been getting at all along, isn't it? That the big story of the universe could become the small story of your experience of grace. That the large concept of gratitude could become your personal encounter with awareness daily. The stories we read of those who respond to God with profound words and generosity that that could become the choices that we now make in our daily lives in response to God. See, sometimes, I think that we imagine that these ancient cultures were somehow more base than ours.
Speaker 1:And don't get me wrong. I mean, they clearly did not understand science the way that we do. They obviously thought differently about the nature of the cosmos and how things came to be. None of them could have imagined the coolness of a Tesla car. And yet, they understood the real struggle of the human story.
Speaker 1:That it is never simply about the acquisition of more and more knowledge. It was always about taking that knowledge and turning it into personal encounter with the divine. Because the joy that this psalm celebrates, The joy that this psalm invites us to celebrate. This is not an easy happiness. It is the divine journey from them to us to I and then back into shared community.
Speaker 1:This is what the Psalms invite us into. So praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me. May the grand story of the cosmos become your personal story of gratitude this day. Let's pray. God, help us as we engage with these words to sift past the distance that sits between us and them and recognize this very human story.
Speaker 1:That there is a big narrative of who you are. Creation that we see all around us when we look to the mountains. And yet somehow, that story is the same story that guided your people throughout history, that was incarnated in the Christ, and now lives and speaks and interacts with us today. Help us to understand that our personal encounters with you are part of this same grand story, and that good wherever we see it is part of what you have gifted to us. God, we ask that you would be with us in the difficult times, that we would feel those times very deeply and honestly, and yet you would help us to be aware of all that there is to be grateful for.
Speaker 1:That we live and breathe and move in you, and this is your gift to us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright. Next Sunday, we have one final psalm.
Speaker 1:And then on September 11, we launch into year three at Commons. It's gonna be a great time, so mark your calendar. Please invite your friends and family. We think it's gonna be a good time, but we will end with this as we always do. Love God, love people, tell the story, have a great week.