The valley of Baca

Today, the psalm of the pilgrim - Psalm 84:

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, indeed it faints
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy
to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
Happy are those who live in your house,
ever singing your praise.
Selah

Happy are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
As they go through the valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools.
They go from strength to strength;
the God of gods will be seen in Zion.

Grace and peace,

Ron

Once more into the breach

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

Whose help, whose hope?

Our meditations in the Psalms continue with Psalm 146:

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

Surely the Lord is the center of the psalmist’s praise! This praise is not lip service, nor is it merely mental assent – this praise comes from the very soul of the worshiper. The feelings of the singer are so strong that twice the psalmist assures us that his or her praises will rise up to God for a lifetime. This ought to beg the question from us, “Why is God worthy of such praise from this person?”

Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.

One of the first ways that we come to understand the praiseworthiness of God is to understand the difference between his divinity and our humanity. Interestingly, the psalmist leads us to this place by making half of the comparison and trusting that we will imagine the implied counterpart. The psalmist describes the unreliability of even those who are perceived to be the best, the noblest, of humankind: royalty. Even princes are not very helpful; after all, they have so many people who ask them for so many things. Yet even if one were to work one’s way into their policies, how could anyone be sure that these nobles would focus long enough, or live long enough, to carry out all of these plans?

The nature of God is an implied contrast. Humans are one thing; God is another – the Other. God is reliable. God is worthy of our trust. God will give us help. His breath will never depart because his breath is eternal. God’s breath spoke the words that called this universe into existence and his breath will call the new heavens and earth into eternal existence. Yet, surely this God is not merely worthy of praise for who he is, but for what he has done.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed;
who gives food to the hungry.

Our God is most worthy of praise because of his mighty acts. Look at what he did for Jacob! Surely he will give happiness to us if we make him our Lord as did Jacob. This God created the heaven and earth and established the laws of physics that hold the universe together. The chaotic sea he made, and calmed, and filled with life. All of these things God faithfully maintains and empowers, even toward eternity.

But the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are not the end of his governance of creation. God also established laws of justice to govern the behavior of those he made in his image. Because God is a relational being, he made humans into relational beings. And the creator of people and power and possessions calls us to use power and wealth as he does: to care for the weak, the powerless, the outcast and even the oppressed. In a creation this fruitful, who should go hungry?

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers;
he upholds the orphan and the widow,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

Here are the words of salvation for those whom we serve. Yes, children have been imprisoned, not just in lockup but perhaps even worse – in bondage to the false gods of this world. God offers freedom. Yes, some children are blind and many of them spiritually so. God offers vision of a sort that they can hardly imagine. Yes, too many children are bowed down with the burdens of this world, and with bad habits that will become sin as they become accountable. Yet God offers his love for those who will accept his righteousness by enacting his justice. Those who do not uphold the powerless will find themselves powerless. That is the other side of his justice.

The Lord will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Lord!

Surely neither this God’s plans, nor his life, will ever fail; he will be God to us, to our children, and to our children’s children. Surely that kind of a God is praiseworthy!

Grace and peace,

Ron

The mountains that surround Jerusalem

Today’s devotional is a meditation on Psalm 125:

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

Where is stability in our world? How many who are in their 30’s will have a 30 year career in one job? How many businesses that we visit this year will be gone ten years from now? How will the tax codes that refunded us money this year take it away next? Change is the nature of this world, not stability. Dependability, truth, reliability, loyalty – these attributes of stability are to be found in the Lord, who abides forever as he is, and, in occasional glimmers, in those people who seek to be like him.

As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the Lord surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore.

If there is anything that people in this world seek, it is security. In many ways I can protect or insulate my family from the cares or the dangers of this world, but that wall is admittedly fragile. We pay our government dearly to protect us from these dangers, yet it cannot. We accumulate money and assets to guard ourselves against the instability of the world in open denial of the reality that whatever the stock market giveth, the stock market taketh. So we join this club, or attend that school, or network with these people, or identify with that church, only to find that these things don’t bring us security either. The only true source of security in this world is God. He is faithful to those who are faithful to him, and that faithfulness is not bound by time, location, or circumstance.

For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest
on the land allotted to the righteous,
so that the righteous might not stretch out
their hands to do wrong.

God is our protection from evil, even that evil that comes from within ourselves. How might the world have been different if Cain had listened to God’s warning that sin was at the door? How different might our world be if we listened to the promptings of our gut, our emotions, of his Spirit about the temptation waiting to mar the goodness that God has given us?

Do good, O Lord, to those who are good,
and to those who are upright in their hearts.
But those who turn aside to their own crooked ways
the Lord will lead away with evildoers.
Peace be upon Israel!

Peace comes from God as the result of relying on his stability, resting within his security, yielding to his protection from evil. Yet that peace is not an absence of change, or insecurity, or evil. Not only do these persistently intrude into the lives of the faithful, but frequently, these are precisely the problems that God calls his children to righteously confront so that others might have the hope of peace. Yet that peace will not typically be found in our environment, but in our heart and our relationships.

May God grant you peace through his grace,

Ron

A wineskin in the smoke

Today another meditation on a section of the great psalm, 119. Hear the words of Psalm 119:81-88:

My soul languishes for your salvation;
I hope in your word.
My eyes fail with watching for your promise;
I ask, "When will you comfort me?"

Sometimes we fret and fume when we are at a place where, for a while, we have to endure pain or suffering. We are distracted, our prayers are weakened, and we become a burden to our acquaintances (yet not our true friends). How much more trying must it be to have to live with pain? Not just for days or weeks, like most of us, but for years? I have several friends who suffer in this way. Month after month, year after year, they hurt, and they find it difficult to work, if they can work at all. The life of their family is reshaped around this suffering, from their rising in the morning, until (and if) they go to bed at night. Yet a knowledge of, and faith in, God’s word, his Torah, sustains even these struggling souls. If they can endure through the night with the hope that the day of God’s comfort, the hour of God’s blessing, will come, then surely God will bring it.

For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke,
yet I have not forgotten your statutes.

At first, we might think that to be such a wineskin means that we have been discarded, tossed into the fire like so much trash. Yet, this is probably not the meaning of the psalmist. There was a purpose for hanging a wineskin near the fire in ancient Israel; this served to mellow a wine in the warmer temperatures so as to make it into a finer beverage. Yes, the wineskin would blacken. Yes, the skin might even crack, but the fire transforms the contents into something marvelous, even as it mars the vessel through the experience. The scars of the saints may well explain the sublimity of their souls. If we can take this view of our sufferings, then perhaps we will be able to emerge, saying, “Yet I have not forgotten your statutes.”

How long must your servant endure?
When will you judge those who persecute me?
The arrogant have dug pitfalls for me;
they flout your law.

It is bad enough that we suffer in this world. Yet it is too often made worse by those who do not suffer, and who do not understand suffering. Those who treat us like pariahs, those who act as if there are not enough degrees of separation between us and them, as if our suffering were in some way contagious. Or does suffering tend to make us paranoid? If nature, and perhaps even our own body has turned against us, isn’t everybody else against us, too? Therefore it is absolutely necessary that we leave the judgment of those whom we perceive to persecute us in the hands of God. If they have flouted his law, then their pitfall shall surely catch them.

All your commandments are enduring;
I am persecuted without cause; help me!
They have almost made an end of me on earth;
but I have not forsaken your precepts.
In your steadfast love spare my life,
so that I may keep the decrees of your mouth.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. This is most particularly clear to us when we keep his words in our mouths day and night. May we choose to so honor God, whether our days are currently bringing us blessing or bane, pleasure or pain.

Grace and peace,

Ron

Sweeter than honey

Today, a meditation on Psalm 119:102-105:

I do not turn away from your ordinances,
for you have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!

It is not as though we have always had this way of thinking. There have been, for many of us, times when we have either not been aware of the value of God’s ordinances, his Torah, or that, having some awareness, we have turned to pick our own path. But the rockiness of the road to disobedience has a way of teaching even the most foolhardy of souls the sweetness of relationships, the satisfaction of company on our journey. Torah maintains those relationships, Torah keeps us in the company of others whose lives are rooted in love, honor, trust, and loyalty. To be right with God, to be right with others, and even to be right with ourselves, we must attend to God’s rules for relationships.

Through your precepts I get understanding;
therefore I hate every false way.

It is not as though Torah anticipates every situation and provides a simple “Do this,” or “Don’t do that.” It does provide a set of principles, and a view of the God who gave them, though. These principles and divine perspective allow us to think through all of our life situations and “get understanding.” We do have a guide that is useful for reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness. The Bible, though, is not about easy and cheap answers, and whenever someone presents the book in that way, it ought to make us more than a little nervous. There are false ways on both sides of the true path, and we ought to hate every one of them.

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.

God’s word is for illumination, not gravitation. It is not meant to be a paperweight, bookend, or doorstop.
God’s word is for illumination, not manipulation. It is meant to reshape the way that humans think, not the thickness of their pocketbook.
God’s word is for illumination, not alienation. It is intended to make clear the connections between people and the ways that we might strengthen them; it is not meant to be molded into bricks to build walls that classify, divide, or protect.

When God’s word properly illumines our path, then we find purpose, strength, and joy. May we so dwell in his word that we find these things today.

Grace and peace,

Ron