Today we will work our way toward Psalm 81:
A friend of mine, Charles Siburt, has said that “Ministry is grief management.” Some people have disagreed with him, but I wonder if that is because they believe instead that ministry is preaching, and the preacher’s job is to fill the silence with the sound of his voice. Although I think that preaching has its place, I don’t think that it does any good to break the silence unless our words heal the holes in people’s hearts. Consider these words:
I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.
A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.
Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!
- Jellaludin Rumin, 13th century Persian mystic
God has made a habit of rushing to the emptiness; God knew that Adam and Eve would experience the emptiness of hunger, so he filled a garden with fruit.
God foresaw that a world covered with water would become a perverse kind of emptiness, a weird lifeless desert, so he had a man build an ark of life, a floating bridge, a place of providence for a world starved of hope, drowned with death, and covered with chaos.
God understood that a people fleeing from oppression would need safety. When this people came to a sea of trouble, a hole that threatened to swallow them whole, God build a bridge down through the water. He bridged the emptiness, and then he allowed the enemies of his beloved to be swallowed by that same emptiness.
Isn't this is what the psalmist celebrates in the 81st Psalm?
Sing aloud to God our strength;
shout for joy to the God of Jacob.
Raise a song, sound the tambourine,
the sweet lyre with the harp.
Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
at the full moon, on our festal day.
For it is a statute for Israel,
an ordinance of the God of Jacob.
He made it a decree in Joseph,
when he went out over the land of Egypt.
I hear a voice I had not known:
"I relieved your shoulder of the burden;
your hands were freed from the basket.
In distress you called, and I rescued you;
I answered you in the secret place of thunder;
I tested you at the waters of Meribah.
Selah
Hear, O my people, while I admonish you;
O Israel, if you would but listen to me!
There shall be no strange god among you;
you shall not bow down to a foreign god.
I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.
Oh, if Israel will only hear, then they will open their empty mouths and God will fill them with what they need: manna and quail and water. Again and again, God jumps into the breach until finally, he sends his Son to show us how to do this for each other.
Jesus steps up to the biggest abyss of them all. Death. Time after time he walks to the edge and calls people up out of the life-swallowing chasm, the trap that has never before yielded anything. Death is disoriented. There are no toe-holds in its pit. There is no rope to reach the bottom of it. Rattled but reassured, death designs its revenge. And it seems all too easy, because Jesus literally seems to run at death. Darkness comes. The grave gapes and swallows. Death celebrates its ultimate banquet; the death of the one who made the tree of life. Too late, Death discovers that God in the flesh has build a bridge down through death to life that need never fear emptiness again. Death will have to swallow itself, and so be done.
He [Jesus] who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things. The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. (Eph 4:10-14)
He fills us with gifts, not so we can hear the sound of our voice in the silence, but so that we can throw ourselves in the breach, so that we can use the gifts that he has given us to heal the holes in the spiritual hearts of the wounded. He would have them brought to wholeness again. He would have us minister by daring to work with the grief of those who surround us. God grant us the courage to do this.
Grace and peace,
Ron
